Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (6 page)

“Karen? Karen… Oh yeah, heck yeah. Thanks, Claire.”

After Ahmet left, Claire looked up from her desk.
My first DDP
, she thought wryly. “Doomsday propositions” had become popular shortly after the discovery of D9. The thinking was “The aliens might kill us soon; we might as well have sex.”

She laughed and sat down at her desk to go through a stack of paperwork. It didn’t take long before she noticed she’d been staring uncomprehendingly at the same document for a couple of minutes. It had been a long day.
Better to get started on this stuff early tomorrow morning, when I can think
, she thought.

She picked up the phone and called for a car to take her back to her apartment at Ft. Meade. The living quarters would have rated three, maybe four stars for a commercial motel. It was as if a talented interior designer had carefully put together a place that didn’t have anything to jump out at an occupant, in either a good way or a bad way. The light green furniture wasn’t ugly or worn, but it wasn’t attractive or new; the modernistic paintings on the blue and yellow wallpaper looked a bit kitschy, but served a decorative purpose.

The first thing Claire did once she got there was call Sam, assure him that she was OK, and listen to a breathless report about a classmate’s experience seeing a red dot not far from school. It was “awesome.”

She wasn’t hungry; she’d helped herself to the never-ending supply of pizza in the main Denver One break room. So, feeling relaxed at last after getting to her apartment and checking with Sammie, she began to change into her nightgown. She caught a glimpse of herself in her underwear in the full-length mirror beside her bed, and paused. The doomsday proposition from Ahmet, clumsy as it was, had reminded her of a forgotten part of life. She turned to the left and to the right, to examine her image. The long legs and her torso weren’t quite as trim and shapely as they had been in her undergraduate days at Arizona State. There, she was one of the top female triple
jumpers in the Pac 12 conference. But an active regimen of tennis, golf, and hiking had kept her tan and fit.

She lifted her chin to take in her “good side.” Viewed from just the right angle, with her short, currently dark blonde hair framing regular features, her looks went from very pretty to darn near beautiful.

I still got it
, she thought.
Most of it, anyway
.

After putting on her nightclothes, she sat on the sofa, staring meditatively at the blank TV screen. She had no regrets about turning down Ahmet’s proposition, but she thought longingly about the intimacy she’d had with Sam’s father, Dillon, a graduate assistant at Caltech. She lingered on memories of the tenderness they shared when alone, the laughs they had shopping and doing other ordinary activities, the flush of happiness they felt when they first saw each other after being apart even for a short while. Finding out that they would have a child together and planning to get married seemed to deepen their love.

But it had all turned bad in a hurry, soon after Claire finished her studies, with Dillon’s addiction to methamphetamines. At first Claire assumed he would come to his senses at some point. He couldn’t possibly throw away the rich life they had together, she thought.

But the lies continued, and the fits of rage and abuse grew more frequent and intense. Claire came to feel she didn’t know Dillon anymore. The wavy blond hair and his clothes became unkempt. He constantly had a hungry look on his face, as if he were always searching for something he craved, and couldn’t bother with his appearance, job, or his daily routine. And he didn’t care who he hurt in his attempts to feed his insatiable hunger. It was the realization that he would risk their son’s welfare that finally pushed Claire to break off contact.

Your dad
, she told Sammie when he was old enough to start understanding,
is sick
.
Like Mrs. Lee next door, but it’s kind of different. He doesn’t get tired and have to stay home like Mrs. Lee, but there’s something wrong, and it’s not his fault. He still loves you and me, but because he’s sick, he can’t show it. You didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He’s just sick
.

She’d known that her son would be scarred by being abandoned by his father, but with love and care from her and her family—Dillon had broken with his own family, and they weren’t in the picture—he was living a happy life.

Claire herself was deeply wounded, and the pain expressed itself in a dream she had every couple of months. She was running, hard, around a long path that curved gradually to the left. Sometimes she pulled back to observe herself on the path, which bent for miles on a broad, sweeping plain. She saw herself as a tiny speck creeping along the trail.

Then, back on the path, she would feel her feet pounding against the ground without ceasing. In the quick shifts of scene in the dream, sometimes she ran naked, sometimes in one running outfit or another.

She was always exhausted. She felt the overwhelming physical pain she’d felt after her toughest workouts or races as an athlete. But she had to run faster. Had to. She had to reach someone or something far down the path. She called out a name, but she could never remember the name after the dream.

As tired and hurt as she was, she had to run faster, and then faster again and again, through even more pain.

She often woke from the dream breathing hard and soaked in sweat, but sometimes she felt oddly detached, as if she had watched a movie. She dreaded having the dream again, but was surprised to find that she looked forward to it in a way; maybe at some point, she would reach whoever or whatever she was pursuing.

She forced herself to be a good mother and to advance her career. She continued to excel and still focused with confidence on new tasks. But the joy she had received from science and her work disappeared. The thrill of the approach of ETs and the new professional challenges it brought partly reawakened her enthusiasm, but she knew it would be temporary. She dreaded the thought of living a life going through the motions.

At first she tried to fill the void left by loss of intimacy with casual sex. Eventually she became disgusted with that lifestyle, though, and with herself for choosing it.

She then went in the opposite direction; to make sure she wasn’t hurt again, she dropped each potential boyfriend at the first sign of any fault—being late for dates, not being completely truthful… After more than a year of doing that, she basically stopped dating and began to suppress desire for intimacy or sexual fulfillment. But the desires were bound to reemerge, and Ahmet’s clumsy proposition gave them a chance.

She got up from the sofa and went to a small cabinet to pick up a bottle of wine she had bought the day before with some groceries. Her habit after days that were especially good, or bad, was to pour herself about a third of a tumbler of her favorite red wine. Tonight she poured her normal ration, set the bottle down for a second, but picked it up and tilted it again briefly, filling the glass about half full. Then she took the glass with her back to the sofa.

W
AR OR
P
EACE

W
hile Ahmet and
others at the Squirrel Cage struggled to make sense of the letter-salad they got from D9, others claimed to be able to understand the messages.

“This word here,” said a male guest on one TV talk show, pointing to the letters
pgocff
on a monitor, “interpreted with this word in Arabic, and this word, which apparently is in Italian, almost certainly means ‘peace.’”

“Hmm. ‘Pgocff’ doesn’t look much like ‘peace,’” said the host of the show.

“That’s why you have to analyze it together with the other words,” said the guest, a former CIA analyst, with a condescending smile.

A newspaper quoted a linguistics professor from England who insisted that correctly analyzing a group of apparently undecipherable words in four different languages revealed that the French word in the group meant “die.” And another group of words in five languages contained the Russian word for “surrender.”

“Obviously, the aliens are threatening us with death,” the professor said.

Some media pundits even said they found understandable messages in D9 transmissions on their own. Results ranged from bloodthirsty threats to extravagant promises of health and long life. One veteran conspiracy discoverer put a dozen groups of letters and characters up on a screen. After he leapt from one incomprehensible connection to another for a minute or two, he confused himself.

“And now when you look at this word… I mean this one… Well, I don’t have time to explain the whole thing, but the gist of it, America, is that we’re facing a virus more deadly than Ebola or anything we’ve ever seen.”

Websites and blogs predicted the full gamut of devastation and salvation, and invariably offered a kit or video everyone must have to be prepared, for only $49.50 or so (“Isn’t your family worth it?”).

Critics noted that almost every interpretation matched what you would expect from a particular source: generally threatening from the right leaning and peaceful from the left.

Two days after the first message arrived, Claire watched yet another expert give his interpretation on TV—peaceful—as she munched on chips in the Denver One break room. Language Unit staffers in the room scoffed at the “political interpretation” and assured everyone that no reliable translations had been made.

Suddenly another staffer said in a loud voice, “Hey, listen!”

“Local law enforcement officers removed onlookers from around the red dot after the radiation was detected,” a network newscaster said after breaking into the scheduled program. “We have no word yet on whether anyone was injured. But we will keep in touch with officials there … there on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan.”

Stunned, Denver One staffers looked at each other with dismay. That could change everything, thought Claire. Then she caught sight of Blake at the door of the break room. He had come looking for her after he got the report about the radiation through the US Homeland Security office.

He hustled her up to a secure communications room while Claire bombarded him with questions. “Is the radiation dangerous? Was anyone hurt? How many other red dots have sent out radiation—or any other energy or material?”

Blake had to tell Claire that at that point he couldn’t give her definite answers. The first useful information came as soon as they stepped into the communications room.

“The radiation was radio waves,” said Stan, Denver One’s liaison with Homeland Security. “A brief emission of low-intensity waves.” When he was
excited, Stan gave out information in short bursts, like bulletins. “That’s what Japanese authorities said. Like you’d get from an FM radio station. And nothing before or since. That radiation is harmless. There are no signs of injury. No damage to anything has been reported.”

Blake and Claire stood looking at Stan in confused silence for a minute or two, trying to make sense of what was happening. “Have any other red dots emitted anything?” Blake finally asked.

Almost simultaneously, Claire asked, “Was there any message in the radio waves?”

“No, and no—so far as we can tell,” Stan said.

Claire and Blake settled into chairs to wait for further information from the Homeland Security and watch TV reports on monitors in the room. Reporting followed the pattern set with the first appearance of red dots—panic and confusion, then intermittent reports from authorities indicating that, for now, no harm was done.

None of the 4,024-known red dots in the United States showed any activity, according to Homeland Security reports. These reports were soon relayed by media outlets, along with interviews from local officials, who said there was no change in any red dot in their area.

Soon, one country after another reported no change in the red dots within their borders. Japan said the one short emission was the only change there.

Claire called the Language Unit several times to find out if there was a message in the radio waves in Japan, and was told they were working on it. Soon after the last call, Ahmet hurried into the communications room.

“We’re sure there’s no message,” he said. “We looked at it up, down, and sideways, and it’s just static.”

Then Stan broke into the conversation with an awe-struck look on his face. “Claire, you’ve got a call. It’s the President.”

“Shoot,” she said. “What am I going to tell him? He has the same reports we do.”

She walked over and took the phone. “Hello, this is Dr. Montague. Yes, Mr. President, we’re just going over the implications now. Can I call you back in ten minutes, at 10:45? Yes, sir, I will.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Blake and Ahmet. “Well, what are the implications?” she asked.

“OK, what’s happened here?” Blake asked in response.

“In a way, nothing changed,” Claire said slowly, as she went through the developments in her mind. “One red dot out of many thousands gave off a short emission of harmless radio waves, like we have all around us every day. And there was no message in the radiation. There’s still no indication the ETs want to harm us.”

“But, but the fact that a red dot did emit
something
, even if it was harmless, is, well, scary,” said Ahmet with a frown. “It means red dots aren’t just like shadows, with nothing in them. They can and do hold something. Maybe they just contain things that won’t hurt us, but who knows what’ll be emitted next, either by accident or on purpose?”

“Bottom line, we’re more or less where we were before the radiation,” said Blake, looking at Ahmet and Claire to see their reaction. “The aliens have incredible technology that could conceivably do us great harm, but there is no clear evidence that they
intend
to harm us. What has changed is that we’ve seen a way they might be able to attack us if they wanted, by sending out something from the red dots. Like Ahmet said, we’ve learned the dots can contain and emit something.”

“The intent is still unknown, but we’ve seen a way they might be able to use to hurt us,” Claire echoed.