The Ambassador

Copyright © 1987 by Bruce R. Jividen

All rights reserved.

KAREN LOVED THE big television set. It was a magic window looking into other places, a place to see new people and learn about the world. Most nights she could be found sprawled out on the floor in front of the set, her eyes nearly glued to the screen. Her parents always told her to sit on the couch and not get so close—the radioactivity coming from the picture tube was bad for her eyes—but Karen didn’t listen. She didn’t want to miss a single detail of the action.

Her parents secretly thought that a twelve-year old shouldn’t watch so much TV, but it was such a convenient way of keeping her out of mischief, they let her get away with it. She was perfectly content to lounge before the set most nights of the week, and on Fridays wild horses couldn’t have dragged her away from the TV. That was when her favorite program came on.

“Karen, it’s time for bed!” her mother called. “We’re taping the show; you can finish watching STARMAN tomorrow.”

“But I don’t want to wait until tomorrow,” Karen protested.

It was useless to argue with mother, however, as she didn’t appreciate the quite obvious benefits of TV, not to mention the benefits of STARMAN. Maybe parents have trouble figuring these things out when they get old, Karen thought sulkily, as she climbed into bed.

As soon as the door was closed, she jumped up and walked over to the window, and looked out into the night. The moon was full and the stars were bright, and Karen found herself wondering if anyone Out There ever watched TV, or had to go to bed early.

It had been silently circling the star for an age, and might continue to do so for ages to come. It was an eavesdropper, completely covered with large dishes, each one an ear listening to a different part of the sky.

There was a lot of noise to be heard, but it was all meaningless. Superconducting computers sifted through the clutter, trying to find something different, a signal that had meaning.

The transmission it picked up from Earth was so weak it had to be amplified thousand-fold before it could even be processed. The signal was carefully analyzed, and the giant craft abruptly reoriented itself. One of the dishes tilted and pointed towards home, and the computers sent their “we have something interesting” message…

“I don’t know what to do,” Karen was saying, a thousand miles and twenty-three years away from her childhood home. She was skinning carrots and some of the peelings were flying onto the speakerphone. One of them even flipped up and stuck to her glasses. “I’ve put my heart and soul into ARGUS, but a University job would pay so much more, and we’ve yet to…hold on, Stacey. I’ve got another call.”

Karen switched lines. “Hello. Oh, hi, Stanley. What? I’ll be right there.” She switched again. “I’ll have to call you back, Stacey. We’ve picked up a signal.”

As Karen drove towards the ARGUS complex, she was thinking, as she always did: This could be the time. The tops of the ARGUS radio telescopes were still gleaming in the light of the New Mexico sunshine, which had already dropped below the horizon. She was breathless and excited as she got out of the Blazer. She always got that way when a potential signal was detected, even though none of the previous ones had panned out.

Karen broke through the doors. The control room was full; everyone had come in to see what was happening. “Okay everybody, what have we got?”

“It looks like the real deal, Karen. We just did a baseline with the space telescope. It’s not coming from Earth orbit,” Stanley Johnson replied.

“What kind of signal is it?”

“Binary pulses at 89.8 megahertz.”

“You’re kidding,” she exclaimed. “You could pick that up on an FM radio.”

“You can,” he concurred. He pointed to the printout. “The first sixty-four prime numbers, repeating over and over. There’s a stop bit and a checksum bit after each number and a block number on the end, also with a stop bit and checksum, and two stop bits after the block. Right now we’re receiving block 906.”

Steve Jackson and Kelley Fuller burst into the room. “We’ve checked eight of the telescopes on manual,” Steve informed. “It’s not a system error.”

Karen was beginning to feel chills. “Okay. Where and how far?”

“Looks like Sixty-One Cygni,” Stanley answered. “It’s a class-A main-sequence yellow dwarf, just like the Sun. Approximate age: seven point four billion years.”

“We’ve surveyed that system before,” Karen pointed out. “If I remember right, there’s an interstellar cloud of ionized gas in between here and there that interferes with radio transmissions.”

“Maybe that’s why the signal’s so strong,” Kelley theorized. “They had to punch through all the garbage.”

“It’s only eleven light years away,” Stanley noted. “Practically next door, by cosmic standards.”

“Okay,” Karen declared. “Kelley, write up a press statement to the effect that we’ve received a message. Don’t overdo it.”

“Wait a minute,” Stanley interrupted. “The signal’s changing.”

Instead of an endless stream of numbers, the display started mapping a picture. Nobody breathed for several seconds.

“What is it?” Karen asked after the picture was completed, echoing the thoughts of nearly everyone.

“Radius of a hydrogen atom, I think,” Stanley conjectured. “They’re just trying to establish a common means of describing things. A frame of reference for measurements, that sort of thing.”

“Measurements? What for?”

He shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“Hold off on that press statement, Kelley,” Karen ordered. “Call the CIA, or the FBI, or NASA, or the Pentagon, or whoever the hell it is we’re supposed to call.”

“The FSA,” Steve said. He was kidding, of course. Everyone knew about Karen’s preoccupation with that old TV classic, STARMAN

The next image began flowing onto the screen. Karen was afraid she was going to go into acute hyperventilation at any moment. “That’s our system!” she exclaimed. “Look, ten planets, Pluto’s cockeyed orbit...but what’s that line?”

“Holy cow!” Stanley shouted. “That’s a trajectory into the solar system.” His mouth dropped as the line converged with the disk representing Earth. “They’re on their way here!”

The room exploded into a commotion of excited, babbling voices.

“Calm down, everyone,” Karen ordered, though she was far from being calm herself. The hubbub gave way to gasps of awe when the next image formed on the screen.

“Is that the spacecraft?” Kelley asked.

“Yes,” Stanley answered, as his computer interpreted the binary digits pouring from the sky and drew them as pixels. “Looks like a Bussard-style interstellar fusion ramjet. Maximum velocity: about ninety-eight percent of the speed of light.” He frowned as he did some mental figuring. “Let’s see, they should reach our system in about...oh, three months, give or take a few days.”

That really caused a commotion. “No need to panic, here,” Stanley amended, “it will take them at least a year to brake into Earth orbit. It looks like they’re heading right for L5.” L5 was a stable point in between the Earth and the Moon where their gravities canceled each other out, ensuring that any object left there would stay there for a long, long time.

By this time, the computer had drawn another image, and when Karen turned to see it, she came very close to fainting. Tears stung her eyes as memories of years ago flooded back into her mind, and she couldn’t even say a word as she looked upon a face she had often watched on another screen, so long ago. Like her, the others were too flabbergasted to speak. They just stared at her in shock with their mouths open.

“If this is a joke, guys,” Karen said testily.

“No chance of that,” Stanley said. “I’m afraid we’ve eliminated every possibility except the truth.”

“I’ll be damned,” Kelley said. “Well, this is your department, Karen. Do you still know how to contact Christopher Barnes?”

Karen felt flushed and excited as she rang the doorbell. She tried to compose herself as the door opened.

“You must be Dr. Conners,” a tall, dark, and indeed handsome man greeted.

“Yes. I’m such a fan of yours, this is really an exciting experience for me.”

Christopher Barnes chuckled. “Thank you. I’m quite interested in your work, doctor. I’ve read a lot about what you’ve been doing.”

They walked into the living room of Christopher’s spacious apartment and sat down on the couch. “So,” Christopher began, “do you think you’ll ever get a message?”

She cleared her throat. “Well, actually, we have.” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her briefcase and went over them with him. They were printouts of the pictures received at Socorro. The last sheet, of course, needed no explanation.

“We believe an episode of STARMAN was the first signal from Earth that broke through the cloud of ionized gas,” she theorized.

Christopher was too overwhelmed to say anything, and it didn’t help matters at all when she said, “They want you to meet them, at L5.” It was so ironic that he would be the first to see a being from another star. How would he ever explain to them what was real, and what was science fiction? Maybe it didn’t matter. After all, the “message” of STARMAN had definitely been real.…

Christopher felt his heart racing as the shuttle carried him, Karen, and a group of others toward the huge starship. It had been analyzed and photographed from every angle, and it was stunning evidence of what technology could accomplish. Every soul on Earth was watching this moment, waiting to see the outcome of the first meeting between alien and man.

"Are you ready, Ambassador Barnes?" Karen asked, as the shuttle drifted to a stop. It was the first time that title was attached to his name, but in the years to come, his name would seldom be heard without it.

"Nothing could get me ready for this," he answered. He and Karen had become very close in the past year. He had a rather big question to ask her, if he returned alive and well from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

"I hope they realize you've changed a little in twenty-five years," she answered. The teenage boy she had been enamored of as a child was now a middle-aged man. They kissed briefly, and Christopher prepared himself for his appointment with destiny.

He stepped into the pod and closed the hatch. As it left the shuttle and drifted closer and closer to the gargantuan spacecraft, Christopher felt no fear, no anxiety, hardly any emotion at all. He was just too overwhelmed by the wonder and awe of the moment. A door in the side of the gigantic hull opened, and the pod was drawn inside by mysterious, invisible forces.

It landed with the gentlest of thuds. The pod door automatically swung upward upon contact and the descent ramp lowered itself to the ground. Christopher checked his O2 meter, then cautiously removed his respiratory tube and sniffed the air. Then he took several deep, long inhales and exhales. Satisfied, he concluded that the atmosphere was quite breathable; apparently all those frantic messages about oxygen had been received and understood after all.

Relieved, he discarded the unnecessary breathing equipment, walked down the ramp, and stepped out into the blue light....

Return to the Campfire

The bluebird of depression

(Cartoon by Bruce R. Jividen, refer to "The Gift")