Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “Darling,” the girl said again.

  The empty voice said: “I am not your husband. I know what you believe.”

  Daw saw it as the figure came down beside him. He thought the girl would not see it, but she said, “Who are you?”

  Through the clear faceplate Daw could see Youngmeadow’s face. The lips shaped: “Not your husband. You would call me a simulation of him. Something that can talk to you; they cannot, or will not, do that directly.” It seemed to Daw that the face, so like Youngmeadow’s, was in some deeper way not like Youngmeadow’s at all, or anyone’s—as though, perhaps, those moving lips concealed organs of sight in the recesses of the mouth, and the voice, the sound he heard, poured forth from the nose and ears.

  “Where is my husband?”

  “I cannot answer that.”

  “Cannot,” Daw asked, “or will not?”

  “There are four words, and all are difficult. What is meant by is? By husband? I can ask, but you could only answer in further words, further concepts we could not define.”

  “You are a simulation of him?”

  “I said, ‘You would call me a simulation of him.’ ”

  Helen asked suddenly, “What have you come to tell us?”

  “That with this”—the figure that looked like Youngmeadow gestured toward the repairs Daw had made—“there has been enough. You have seen something of us; we, now, of you. There cannot be more, now. We both must think.”

  “Are you trying to tell us,” Daw asked, “that we could not have worked out a philosophy for dealing with your culture until we made this contact?”

  “I can answer few questions. We must think. You too.”

  “But you want us to leave your ship. Are we friends?”

  “We are not,” the simulation answered carefully, “not-friends.” He lifted off as a man would have, and in a few seconds was gone.

  “He wasn’t your husband,” Daw said.

  “I know it.”

  “Do you trust me, Helen? Will you take my word for something?”

  She nodded.

  “Your husband is dead. It’s over.”

  “You know.”

  Daw thought of the scattered bits of rag and vacuum-shriveled flesh he had seen—and not mentioned to the girl overhead—while making the repairs. “I know,” he said.

  He lifted off, and she flew beside him for a time, silently. There was a dysfunction in his headphones so that he heard, constantly, a sound like the noise of the wind. It was not unpleasant, except that it was a dysfunction. At last she said, “Was he ever alive, Captain? Do you know what I’ve been thinking? That perhaps he never was. The cabins, you know.”

  “What about them?” Daw asked.

  “They’re only supposed to be for one person, but you had two of us in there. Because everybody knows empathists have to be married . . . and there’s Wad—he really wasn’t on the ship either. Are you sure my husband existed, Captain? That he wasn’t just something implanted in our minds before we left Earth? I can remember the way he held me, but not one thing he said, not word for word. Can you?”

  “He was real,” Daw said, “and he’s dead. You’ll feel better when you’ve seen the medics and had some rest.”

  “Captain . . .”

  “He came in here,” Daw said, “and somehow he realized the truth, that the crew of this ship—whatever you want to call them—was still on board. Then he thought the same thing you did: that he would break something and make them notice him. His empathy was all for people, not for things. He broke something and they noticed him, and he’s dead.”

  “Only people are important,” the girl said.

  “To other people,” Daw answered, “sometimes.”

  On board Gladiator she said: “I never told you what it was I asked Wad, did I? I was asking about you—what your childhood was like.”

  In Daw’s mind a voice more insistent than hers quoted: “At the resurrection, therefore, of which of the seven will she be the wife? For they all had her.” But Jesus answered and said to them, “You err because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For at the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage . . .”

  Aloud he said, “I hope Wad told you the truth.”

  “When you were in training—I mean, like he is now—you were watching a simulated captain, weren’t you? Was it yourself you saw there, only older?”

  “I don’t think so,” Daw said. “A real captain. He was a crusty bastard, but he generally knew what he was doing.”

  PICTURES DON’T LIE

  by Katherine MacLean

  The alien ship, crewed by beings of good will, was ready to land and greet the Earthlings. What could possibly go wrong?

  ***

  Katherine MacLean’s first written story (though while she was revising it to John W. Campbell’s editorial request, a couple of her other stories got into print before it), “Incommunicado,” dealing with a crisis on a space station which is solved by communication theory, appeared in the June 1950 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction and made her reputation instantly—and not just among her readers and colleagues in science fiction. When she tried to sneak into an invitation-only science conference, and the gatekeeper asked her name, she was suddenly surrounded by the legitimate attendees who had read “Incommunicado” and were eager to meet its author. (Incidentally, “Incommunicado” is my favorite MacLean story, though “Fearhound” is close behind.) She won a Nebula Award for her novella, “The Missing Man” (later incorporated in her novel with the same title) and was named an SFWA Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2003. Her story collections The Diploids and The Trouble with You Earth People are both out of print (which is unforgiveable in the age of e-books), but are certainly worth seeking out in used copies. And, if I may wax politically incorrect for a moment, the next time you hear someone claiming that there were no women writing SF before the 1970s (or the 1980s, or the 1990s—the purveyors of this nonsense keep moving the chronological goalposts), remember the date of her first published story, “Defense Mechanism”: 1949. As writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight once commented, “As a science fiction writer, she has few peers . . .” Still very true.

  The man from the News asked, “What do you think of the aliens, Mr. Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?”

  “Very human,” said the thin young man.

  Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady, faint drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where They would arrive. On the concrete runways the puddles were pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.

  Back at a respectful distance from the place where the huge spaceship would land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted, sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space.

  “Do you know anything about their home planet?” asked the man from the Herald.

  The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of questions but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions at once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.

  “No, nothing directly.”

  “Any ideas or deductions?” the Herald persisted.

  “Their world must be Earthlike to them,” the weary-looking young man answered uncertainly. “The environment evolves the animal. But only in relative terms, of course.” He looked at them with a quick glance and then looked away evasively
, his lank black hair beginning to cling to his forehead with sweat. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “Earthlike,” muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed nothing more in the reply.

  The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed, and received a quick glance in exchange.

  The Herald asked Nathen, “You think they are dangerous, then?”

  It was the kind of question, assuming much, that usually broke reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to know.

  The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. “No I wouldn’t say so.”

  “You think they are friendly, then?” said the Herald, equally positive on the opposite tack.

  A fleeting smile touched Nathen’s lips. “Those I know are.”

  There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, “What led up to your contacting them?”

  Nathen answered, after a hesitation, “Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn’t they?”

  The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public.

  Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. “My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns.”

  The officer cleared his throat but said nothing.

  The reporters smiled, noting that down.

  Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it.

  Nathen continued, “In my spare time I started directing the pickup at stars. There’s radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn’t seem natural.”

  He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to him while he listened, an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.

  “I decided it wasn’t natural. I tried decoding it.”

  Hurriedly, he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. “You see, there’s an old intelligence trick, speeding up a message on a record until it sounds just like that, a short squawk of static, and then broadcasting it. Undergrounds use it. I’d heard that kind of screech before.”

  “You mean they broadcast at us in code?” asked the News.

  “It’s not exactly code. All you need to do is record it and slow it down. They’re not broadcasting at us. If a star has planets, inhabited planets, and there is broadcasting between them, they would send it on a tight beam to save power.” He looked for comprehension. “You know, like a spotlight. Theoretically, a tight beam can go on forever without losing power. But aiming would be difficult from planet to planet. You can’t expect a beam to stay on target, over such distances, more than a few seconds at a time. So they’d naturally compress each message into a short half-second- or one-second-length package and send it a few hundred times in one long blast to make sure it is picked up during the instant the beam swings across the target.”

  He was talking slowly and carefully, remembering that this explanation was for the newspapers. “When a stray beam swings through our section of space, there’s a sharp peak in noise level from that direction. The beams are swinging to follow their own planets at home, and the distance between there and here exaggerates the speed of swing tremendously, so we wouldn’t pick up more than a bip as it passes.”

  “How do you account for the number of squawks coming in?” the Times asked. “Do stellar systems rotate on the plane of the Galaxy?” It was a private question; he spoke impulsively from interest and excitement.

  The radio decoder grinned, the lines of strain vanishing from his face for a moment. “Maybe we’re intercepting everybody’s telephone calls, and the whole Galaxy is swarming with races that spend all day yacking at each other over the radio. Maybe the human type is standard model.”

  “It would take something like that,” the Times agreed. They smiled at each other.

  The News asked, “How did you happen to pick up television instead of voices?”

  “Not by accident,” Nathen explained patiently. “I’d recognized a scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in any language.”

  Near the interviewers, a senator paced back and forth, muttering his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide streaming windows into the gray, sleeting rain.

  Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms, and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the senator to make his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up before them, and a small hand-mike sat ready on the table before the panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of equipment with “Radio Lab, U.S. Property” stenciled on it.

  “I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began working on them,” Nathen added. “It took a couple of months to find the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands and assign them the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen.”

  The shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners to some kind of sane picture.

  “Trial and error,” said Nathen, “but it came out all right. The wide band spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning.”

  He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.

  “We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set working and started recording and playing everything that came in, we found we’d tapped something like a lending-library line. It was all fiction, plays.”

  Between the pauses in Nathen’s voice, the Times found himself unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching rocket jets.

  The Post asked, “How did you contact the spaceship?”

  “I scanned and recorded a film copy of The Rite of Spring, the Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn’t get there for a good number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please the library to get a new record in.

  “Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings, we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear and loud. We’d intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore, you see. They liked the film and wanted more . . .”

  He smiled at them in sudden thought. “You can see them for yourself. It’s all right down the hal
l where the linguists are working on the automatic translator.”

  The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin young man turned to him quickly. “No security reason why they should not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them.” He said to the reporters reassuringly, “It’s right down the hall. You will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches.”

  The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a closed door.

  They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with empty folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed behind them, bringing total darkness.

  There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around him, but the Times man remained standing, aware of an enormous surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the wrong country.

  The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.

  He was looking at aliens.

  The impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving oddly, half-dancing, half-crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other, and put them on.

  Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid, and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he watched them.

  They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said and grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away from him.