Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (12 page)

When Claire got near enough to see the red dot, she stopped short and stared. She’d seen them hundreds of times on TV or in pictures, and read dozens of reports with the latest scientific information on them. But she was just as dumbstruck as Bret and Darren had been when they first saw a red dot in a Kansas pasture. The perfectly round red circle, about eight feet in diameter—sent who knew how or why, from living beings far from Earth—mesmerized her.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” the elderly man said softly after a few seconds.

His question roused her from a kind of trance. For a few seconds, she had forgotten where she was, and even to breathe. “It is,” she said, glancing at the man, who sat on the ground with his arms resting on his knees. “It’s … it’s something I’ve never seen or experienced before. Or even imagined.”

Although she had been immersed day and night in study of D9 since it first appeared on the Mt. Lemon telescope, and had read stories of people saying they had been profoundly moved by the sight of a red dot, seeing it now changed everything. Her world would never be the same. Really knowing, seeing, and feeling that there was intelligent life beyond Earth gave her a new knowledge at the core of her view of the world, as powerful a life-changing experience as a marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one.

She went over and sat near the man, and they introduced themselves. He was a retired plumber named Ray, who lived with a son and daughter-in-law in Laurel. Claire told him about her work with D9. Ray asked her questions about her work, but Claire felt like her efforts seemed somewhat beside the point now, with the red dot captivating their attention just yards away.

Ray told her he’d had the same feeling of a profound beginning when he first came to see the red dot a week earlier. He came initially as a distraction from a tense situation at home. Ray’s health was failing. His round, clean-shaven face was calm, but thinning white hair and sagging chin and facial skin reflected all of his seventy-four years. Claire noticed later that it was a struggle for him to stand up.

When he’d first moved in with his son and his wife six years before, he could do chores and keep an eye on the couple’s two teenage children, and drive them around. Then arthritis gradually tightened its grip, and his hearing and vision faded; triple bypass surgery after a heart attack two years before had left him weak, and fearful for his health and life. As months wore on, his son and daughter-in-law grew resentful that they had finally raised two children but now had to care for an increasingly frail old man. Ray admitted he hadn’t helped matters, as he became more irritable and argumentative. In the last few months, he told Claire, his unhappiness had increased, and he’d started to think “bad thoughts.”

“Now I sit on my little hill every morning and enjoy the woods and watch the red dot,” he said. “It’s very peaceful. I know I’m still going to get weaker and I’m not gonna live forever, but … I don’t know, it’s easier now.”

Claire wanted to say something comforting, but none of the stock phrases she thought of seemed appropriate, and she kept quiet for a few minutes.

Ray wasn’t the only one who found comfort viewing a red dot. Numerous stories emerged about people who said they felt more calm and peaceful when they went to see one. That was all part of the aliens’ evil plan, according to conspiracy theorists, who thought the ETs would somehow gain control of the minds of those who regularly contemplated the red dots.

Claire and Ray’s conversation turned to the thoughts that had occurred to him as he watched the red dot. He hadn’t finished high school, and, with a smile on his friendly face, he assured Claire that he’d been a bit of a troublemaker as a youth. But he’d always been an avid reader, and liked to take his young family on wide-ranging trips to see new things when he could. He’d done some serious thinking about the ETs in the last week.

“Why is it the aliens are always evil super-nerds in movies and books? I mean we’ve had Edison and Einstein—nerds that advanced human understanding. And we’ve had evil figures like Hitler and Pol Pot. But we’ve also had Jesus and Buddha and Martin Luther King. These things, these creatures, have obviously gone way, way beyond us in technology. But what about spiritually? In the hundreds of thousands of years or whatever it took them to develop this unbelievable technology, with a lot of starts and
stops, maybe their civilization, or most of it, reached some higher stage of enlightenment.”

Claire chatted with Ray and observed the red dot longer than she’d planned. Like Ray, she started calling it “Forty-Two,” after the number of the nearby county road. For an hour, other onlookers came and went, and shadows of the trees shortened in front of them as the sun rose at their backs. When Ray got up to go home, they agreed to try to meet at Forty-Two the next weekend.

Claire drove back to her apartment to spend some time with her family before she went to Denver One. She had delayed bringing her son out for a few days because of the heightened fear and uncertainty after the red dots showed up. When she called home to set up his trip, her parents said they wanted to accompany him and rent an apartment near Claire “to be able to help take care of Sammie while you’re so busy.” Claire thought that they were actually worried that the ET contact might turn deadly, and wanted the opportunity to be near their daughter and grandson. Claire’s sister Mae came with them, and planned to stay for a few weeks.

Claire told everyone, including herself, that the ETs were peaceful, but she was relieved and happy to have her family near.

Early in the afternoon, she drove to Denver One. As soon as she walked in the door, a staffer told her to go up to the Language Unit. “I think they just now really got something,” he said.

Cindy saw Claire come up the stairs and rushed over. “We’ve had one of those breakthroughs we talked about,” she said with even more than her usual enthusiasm. “And we’ve made a major discovery about D9’s communication technology. The breakthrough is thanks to Ahmet. He realized the ETs were trying to communicate with us on the basis of the language in the TV and radio signals they had received. Ahmet sent out an advisory to language units in different countries to suggest they take into account peculiarities of different dialects or ways of communicating. You know, like language from US Western movies of the 1950s and ‘60s, or radio comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
Ahmet thought this might give us a break in accelerating our process of deciphering their messages beyond just adding a word or two each time. And he was right,” she finished, turning to Ahmet, who had walked up beside them.

“The new way of looking at the messages did get us a couple more words in English and Arabic, I think, and the Serbs really hit the jackpot,” an excited Ahmet said. “They noticed that the transmission used the speech patterns of a popular poet—a guy whose work had been broadcast on the radio. This guy used images of animals and birds as symbols of things like peace, war, prosperity. So their linguists were able to put together words that otherwise didn’t seem to mean anything. And…” he said with a big smile as he shook a sheet of paper he was holding in his right hand, “we’ve got the first message that actually communicates with us.”

Claire and Cindy stared at him with intense anticipation for a few moments.

“Oh,” he said mischievously. “You want to know what it
says
. Basically we were able to get twenty-nine of the thirty-eight words in the Serbian message, after going through all thirty-six languages. They included ‘black,’ ‘throat,’ and ‘bird.’ This poet used the image of black-throated loons migrating from the north to lakes in Serbia during the spring, when the weather was good and life was flourishing—‘The land grows green; the rippling face of the water barely contains the surge of life within.’ Obviously this stood for peaceful and prosperous times. And the transmission also had the words ‘red’ and ‘circle.’ We’re confident the message is that the red dots aren’t harmful, and are a symbol of peace. We calculated almost 80 percent confidence, and intuitively I’d say over 90 percent.”

Disoriented, Claire watched Ahmet and Cindy, and the windows and desks in front of her start to flow to the left. Suddenly she was struggling to keep her balance. Even with the profound experiences she’d had in the last month—discovering an alien space craft, being present for the first (indecipherable) transmission from ETs, seeing a red dot—hearing the first communication from a being outside of Earth was the most overwhelming. Being able to talk to, ask questions, learn from, and exchange ideas and feelings with a creature from another world was astounding.

“You OK?” asked Ahmet, looking at her with concern.

“Yes. Yes, I’m OK. Give me just a second. Now, you made a discovery about their communication technology?”

“This is really cool,” said Ahmet, even more excited than before. “We and some other stations around the world noticed D9 was replying to our messages really quickly, given that it takes a certain amount of time for the transmissions to travel back and forth.

“Then,” he said, almost literally hoping from one foot to the other in his excitement, “this morning we got a response more than a minute sooner that it should have been able to travel between us!”

Claire silently mouthed the words, “Oh, my God.”

“Obviously they’re doing something strange with the speed of light,” Ahmet exclaimed. He described how Denver One had sent D9 a message, asking them to send back a transmission immediately. The response came less than two minutes later. Given the time it probably took the ETs to decipher the Denver One message and go through the process of sending their own message, Ahmet said, it appeared the radio wave traveled both ways between the two destinations instantaneously.

“It makes sense if you’re tens of thousands of light years from your home base to use a communication system like that,” Ahmet said. “And their communications problems may be due to their not completely mastering the technology yet.”

“We’ve had a busy morning,” said a beaming Cindy.

“Got to call the President, especially about the message showing peaceful intentions,” Claire said. “Ahmet, can you give me a copy of the whole message? And please come with me, in case he has any questions.”

Claire dialed up the President in the secure communications room. She was so staggered by the receipt of a real message from the ETs that she didn’t think at first about the instant attraction she’d had for the President at their last meeting. But as their short conversation went on, she found comfort listening to his voice, and would have gladly talked to him longer—much longer.
It’s like I’m sixteen years old again
, she thought, remembering her interminable
phone calls with boyfriends, and her annoyed parents repeatedly asking if she didn’t have homework to do.

President Douthart, unknown to Claire, felt the same way at the end of their call. Even with the pressing issues he faced, he would have been happy to keep talking to Claire about matters big and small—wherever their conversation led them. But now he had to arrange a press release relaying the ETs’ message, but stressing that the US military was still on alert. He asked Claire to make a report on the message breakthrough at the NSC meeting scheduled the next morning.

After Claire hung up, she saw Ahmet standing to her left with a bemused look on his face. “You and the President are pretty chummy,” he remarked.

“Not really,” said a flustered Claire, instantly wishing she had come up with a better answer.

She couldn’t admit how pleased she was that Douthart had set up regular calls to her at sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 every weekday afternoon. The calls started the next day, and Claire meticulously prepared her briefings. Although she and the President engaged in small talk about work, there was little conversation about personal matters. Everything was on a “Mr. President” and “Dr. Montague” basis.

But what Claire looked forward to most was the emotional connection with Douthart. After a few days, she could instantly detect his mood and how much stress he was under that day, from the tone of his voice.

“What do you have for me, Dr. Montague?” he asked to start one of their briefings.

By the slow cadence and weary tone—and the lack of his usual quip—Claire knew it had been an especially hard day for the President. After giving her briefing, she listened patiently as he ranted.

“Did you see Representative Sauer last evening on TV, going after me for not ‘standing up to bullies’ in Russia, as he put it? He’s one of the geniuses who has also criticized me for not being tough enough on China, Iran, and Japan, and … and committing too many resources overseas, instead of
concentrating on the home front. Does he think I have a machine that just churns out troops and aircraft carriers and money?”

When the President paused for a few seconds, Claire said, “I saw your response, Mr. President, and it was clear and devastating. You really cut him down to size.”

After the President wound down a bit, he and Claire remained silent for ten or twenty seconds, to let Douthart’s emotions settle.

“Sorry, Dr. Montague…”