Alien Affairs

July, 1954

Lambert Gray was writing on the blackboard in the lab that he and Miles Ashly cobbled together in an old OSS building on the Mall to facilitate their efforts to decipher the alien language. He turned when he heard the door creak and saw Ashly enter. “Based on frequency of use and syntactical location in the text, I am convinced that these words are nouns, these are verbs and that these are conjunctions.” He gestured to three short columns with his chalk.

“You’re getting good at reproducing their characters,” Ashly said. Each column only contained three or four words. “Unfortunately, until we can figure out which nouns and verbs, we’re not much farther on.”

“Still, I suggest that as you ponder the pages of the device, you watch for these words and consider them in these contexts.”

Ashly attempted to do just that. He made a point of memorizing the patterns of the otherworldly characters and watched for them when he tricked the thing into scrolling to a new page. The first time he recognized one of the words, a startling thing happened—so jarring, in fact, that he did not mention it to his coworker. The second time it happened he felt more sure that it was not his imagination.

“I say, Bertie, I’d like you to try something. Pick up the damned thing and let it give you new pages until you spot one of your words.”

Gray did as requested until he saw a familiar word. “My God. What was that?”

“You heard it too, didn’t you?”

“I heard what must surely be the pronunciation of the word in my head.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know. Why did it never happen before?”

“Because it knows that we recognize that word and it responded to us.”

“Do you suppose if we recognized all the words that it would read to us?”

“I don’t know. Let me work with it some more.”

Ashly focused on words of two or three characters that were easy to remember. Each time he spotted one the voice of the book spoke it to him in his mind.

Ashly said when he took a break, “Well, after a year we’ve at least taught the bloody thing a new trick.”

“I don’t think we taught it anything. I think it is teaching you something. Keep up the good work. Since you’re hogging it, I’m going to call it a day.”

By late that evening Ashly had learned to pronounce some two dozen alien words, although still totally ignorant of their meaning. On assimilating the twenty-fourth word the page went blank, a single new word appeared and beside it a figure.

“My God,” he said aloud. The figure was unmistakably an alien being. Having no ‘need to know,’ the description of the creatures had never been revealed to him. Ashly gaped at the image and repeated aloud the word that he heard in his mind. Instantly the screen refreshed with a new word and image. Some pictures were incomprehensible and others he presumed to be alien animals—the equivalents of dogs and cats, no doubt. The novelty of it kept him awake all night.

When Gray arrived in the morning finding his partner in the same clothes, he said, “What the hell? You onto something?”

“You won’t believe this, Bertie, old man. The damn thing has turned itself into a primer. It is teaching me to read and speak its language.”

“I’ll be damned. How did you get it to do that?”

“After I learned to say so many words, it started showing me pictures of what they mean.”

“This must be how they teach their kids to read.”

“Remarkable, isn’t it.”

“I want to try it.”

“Well, frankly, I could use some sleep. Here, just concentrate on learning to say the words when you recognize them. I got up to—let’s see, it was twenty-four words when it took over.”

“I wonder if that’s a critical number.”

“I believe it is. They have four fingers on each hand.”

“Ah, a base eight number system.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s a damned nuisance that we only have one of these. Maybe we could work in shifts.”

“I was thinking of dictating into a wire recorder so you have something to study.”

“You can’t give it up can you?”

“Not now. What we really need is a stenographer to do the transcription for us.”

“Maybe Dulles will let us have one now that we have a breakthrough.”

“I’ll see if I can get a minute with him on my way home.”

Ashly called the director’s private secretary and told her that he had big news. Dulles said he should come to his office immediately. Allen Dulles kept his office on E Street, which was en route to Ashly’s home in Georgetown.

“My God, man, you look like hell,” Dulles said.

“I’ve been at it all night. Had a marvelous development and couldn’t stop.”

“Yes, have you cracked it?”

“We’re a long way from translating it but we’ve got the book teaching us how to read it.”

“Fantastic.”

“It would really go a lot faster if we had a stenographer.”

Dulles frowned and pushed out his lower lip. “Can’t have it. If a woman got wind of what you’re doing it would be all over town.”

Inwardly, Ashly groaned. “By the way, were the creatures skinny with bulbous heads and big eyes?”

“How did you find that out?” Dulles said.

“It’s got illustrations now.”

Ashly expected to find that Gray had worked all night but he was freshly shaved and had changed baggy suits. “What? Didn’t pull an all nighter?”

“No, too old for that and I didn’t have your luck with the evil beast.”

“Don’t give up. Oh, Dulles won’t give in to a stenographer but I requisitioned a wire recorder. In a few hours you’ll have some study material. By the way, I discovered that one of your nouns is a verb meaning to put in and a conjunction is a noun meaning an animal—likely an alien cat or some such.”

“Well, there you go. Anyway, keep at it. I’ll keep working on patterns in the syntax.”

Miles Ashly spoke Russian, Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, French, Polish, Latin and Greek. Learning the alien language came easily once he had some momentum behind him. He entered the lab and said something that sounded like he was speaking while brushing his teeth.

“Good day to you too, Miles,” Gray replied.

“Bertie, you should really practice speaking, your accent is terrible.”

“I can read it just fine. I don’t plan on talking to an alien any time soon.”

“You never know. They might land on the White House lawn and say, ‘Take me to your leader’.”

“Then you can translate for Eisenhower and I’ll keep transcribing text. Damn Dulles! It would go ten times faster if we could dictate it. If he’s afraid of girls with big mouths he could find a man who takes shorthand couldn’t he?”

“Find anything interesting?”

“No, the last thing I looked at appeared to be a children’s book.”

“I’m beginning to think that this thing might contain everything ever written by their civilization.”

“That couldn’t be. There’s got to be an end to it somewhere.”

“Well, it’s vast. Somehow we’ve got to find the table of contents or we’ll never live long enough to find anything useful.”

“If it talks to us telepathically, we ought to be able to tell it what we want to see,” Gray said.

“I suppose we can. We just haven’t learned how yet.”

Ashly took up the alien reading device and willed his mind to think in its language, “Table of Contents.” Nothing happened. Next he tried, “List of titles,” again to no result. After “All the books,” and “Index,” failed to produce results, he said, “Dammit, man, it doesn’t make sense that the reader has no choice but to read everything in the order it gives it to you.”

“Try thinking like an alien.”

Ashly spent the day thinking like an alien until he was utterly frustrated, then he had a flash of insight. “Mission Plan,” he thought and a document opened, the first sentence read, “Mission Plan to third planet from star YG-176.” He began to read.

August 1954

The antiquated office that the CIA gave Ashly and Gray as their lab was stiflingly hot even with an oscillating fan on the windowsill. Lambert Gray said, “I think it’s time to take this to Dulles.”

“I quite agree, besides his office is air conditioned.”

When Gray made a phone call he was told that Dulles was in Europe, so they had no choice but to continue to sweat and transcribe more text from the mission plan.

“What do you think Dulles is going to say when he hears this?” Gray asked.

“He’s going to call us liars, of course.”

When they finally got to see the director he exploded. “That’s absolute bullshit. You can’t come in here and insult my intelligence with this crap. What are you trying to do?”

Ashly had expected skepticism but this outburst stunned him.

Gray said, “Sir, we are only telling you what we found on the device.”

“It’s some sort of hoax. Maybe propaganda.”

“What sense does that make if we were never intended to see it?” Gray asked.

“Director, you’re shooting the messenger,” Ashly said. “This is earth shattering information. Just because you don’t like it, you can’t ignore it.”

“I’ve lived my whole life knowing that what you are saying is not true. I will not accept it.”

“Sir, you can’t do that. We have to take this to the president.”

“He’d say we’ve all lost our minds.”

“Nevertheless, he must be told.”

Dulles smoked his pipe and sulked. Ashly and Gray exchanged quizzical glances and waited. After several minutes, he took the pipe from his mouth and said, “All right, dammit, I’ll take you to the president and when he has you both committed, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Harry Truman had briefed Eisenhower and Dick Nixon on the events at Roswell from 1947 and had informed them that the extraterrestrial book was in the hands of the CIA. When Dulles led his mismatched team into the Oval Office, Eisenhower was alone. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Please have a seat and let’s get to the point, but first, can I see the damned thing?”

“Of course, sir.” Ashly handed it to the president as casually as if it were a paperback.

Eisenhower saw the characters start to rise on the display and felt the momentary disorientation associated with it. “It quit,” he said.

“Yes, sir, because you can’t read it. That odd voice you heard in your head was the book reciting itself to you, but when it didn’t get positive feedback from your brain, it shut down.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, if I may, sir.” Eisenhower gave it back to him and Ashly demonstrated that in his hands it continued to scroll. “It senses my brainwaves and understands my level of comprehension. If Bertie takes it, it will slow down because he has had less opportunity to work with it and reads slower.”

“Fantastic,” Eisenhower said. “So what’s on it?”

Gray said, “It has a variety of items. Manuals, pleasure reading, even pornography—”

Eisenhower said, “What?”

Allen Dulles laughed. “How can you even tell?”

Ashly grinned and said, “It’s perfectly obvious. The characters are saying how much they esteem each other, then begin touching, and before you know it, they’re sticking this and that into here and there.”

“They are hermaphroditic,” Gray said. “They copulate rather like earthworms.”

Eisenhower made a bitter face. “Okay, what have you got that I should care about?”

Dulles took a deep breath and Gray began, “One of the items in the device is the scope of their mission to earth—their orders, you might say. It is quite detailed.”

“And...”

The cryptographer hesitated before saying bluntly, “They created us and they had returned to destroy us.”

Eisenhower whose steely nerves had launched the Normandy Invasion in stormy weather looked stunned. “What do you mean ‘they made us?’ Are you telling me they’re God?”

“No, sir. They reject the existence of God. Millions of years ago they came to earth and began an experiment to see how intelligence would evolve in our environment.”

“Well, they sure as hell didn’t make us in their image.”

“No, they began with a cat-sized primate with a prehensile tail and selected for intelligence in a captive breeding program. They returned sometime later, probably a million years or so, and repeated the process with the primate that had evolved from their previous effort. This continued until we evolved as we are.”

“So why destroy us?”

Ashly said, “The experiment is over. They learned what they wanted and consider that the level of technology we’ve arrived at makes us a threat to the status quo of their galactic neighborhood.”

Dulles asked, “Do we know where that neighborhood is?”

“They come from Tau Ceti, a star system eleven point nine light years away,” Gray said.

“Do we have reason to think that they will try again?” the president asked.

“Absolutely. Their orders specifically state that they were to report success or the possibility of failure. Even if the crash prevented them from sending a final message, the failure to report success will be obvious eleven point nine years after 1947.”

“Shit! I could still be president.”

The room indulged in a relieved chuckle. Dulles said, “It occurred to me since we first spoke of this that there are still plenty of UFO sightings going on, so why are we still here?”

Ashly said, “Other cultures. The mission plan refers to other cultures from other worlds observing what our creators were doing here. Sort of watchdogs to see that the mad scientists weren’t doing anything that could negatively impact them. Their intent seems to be to avoid confrontation with other cultures.”

The president asked, “Are these other cultures belligerent?”

“Apparently the potential for belligerence exists but they generally avoid one another. Space is a big place.”

“Yes it is, so why do they all have to meet here?”

“We’re a curiosity.”

“Do you think they could have a base on the moon?”

“We have found no mention of that possibility, but then again, we don’t know how much capacity the device has. We may be reading it for decades,” Ashly said.

Eisenhower looked at his watch. “Is there anything else I should know?”

“We don’t think so, sir.”

“All right. Well, thank you, and keep reading. If you find something new let me know immediately—something besides alien sex books, that is. Allen, I’ve a few more things to discuss with you.”

When the two CIA men left Eisenhower asked, “How should we handle this?”

“Handle it? We should ignore it.”

“Ignore it?”

“I can’t reject the existence of God on the word of two lunatics and some creature from outer space.”

“Allen, your devotion is admirable, but what motive do these two have for inventing such a cockamamie story?”

“Maybe the Russians have turned them.”

“And what’s the Russians’ motive?”

“Destabilize us.”

Eisenhower scowled. “Can you get someone else trained to read the damn thing?”

Dulles sucked his pipe. “I suppose, given time.”

“We don’t have time. Find some language genius, who you trust completely, and get him to prove or deny what these two are telling us. In the meantime, get some money funneled to the Nazi rocket guy—”

“Von Braun?”

“Yeah, tell him to start building a rocket to go to the moon, and light a fire under his ass.”