A Ripple in Space: Chapter 2
Dr. Frank Lee left the Oval Office briefing, dismissive of the frothing national security apparatus that remained with the President. Elated, he nearly danced through the narrow halls of the less-photogenic side of the White House, back to the office of the Chief Operating Officer of the National Space Council.
Of course the generals were terrified, he chuckled. They see the world in degrees of threats, and the most insidious threat to a military brain was the unknown. But this was the most significant event in human history! We’re not alone! The cosmos is about to open up to us, and the brass are scrambling doomsday planes.
Frank hummed happily as he unlocked his closet-like office and planted himself at his desk. Had he been more reflective, he might have realized he hadn’t felt this excited and energized for most of his adult life. “Happy” is not a word with which Frank was intimately familiar and “joyous” was an outright foreign concept. But, that’s exactly how the bespeckled astrophysicist felt.
We’ve made contact!
“Yes?”
A hulking shape of a man opened the door. As if pulled straight out of a catalog for Secret Agent Weekly he looked like the Terminator reprogrammed for Men in Black duty.
“Dr. Lee, your presence is needed immediately at the DLC. Please come with me.”
Frank tossed the acronym around his frontal lobe for several moments before shrugging in confusion at Agent Terminator.
“The Dave Location Committee. Please come.”
* * * *
For most people, the extent of their knowledge of the stars is that they produce light and heat. For those who have taken Graduate Studies into Stars and have listened to the Sun, a song by They Might Be Giants, they know “the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.” They also know iron and aluminum and many other elements exist as a gas in the Sun, such is the great heat. For those who have gone on to their layman’s post-Doctorate Degrees, they also heard on PBS that individual photons can bounce around inside a star for a million years before ever escaping the gravitational pull. Photon xj6 * 10 ^ 13 million (for such is how photons name themselves) just had his 1,000,723rd birthday. His parents had finally allowed him to travel as long as he agreed to stay with several trillion of his closest friends. As they departed Sol, setting out on what was to be the most thrilling 8 minutes and 20 seconds of their lives, they blasted their way toward the best party planet in the solar system. The entire trip was full of horseplay and bouncing around at an incredible speed. As they neared Earth, xj6 * 10 ^ 13 million said, “Listen up chaps! This is it! This is the big show! This is where we make our mark on the world! Hang in there and follow me!” They arrived shortly before 5:56 am GMT, on Sunday, July 4th, 1943, at Stonehenge. The park ranger heard there were disturbances out around the great old stones. He knew tourists often tried to get small pieces of them as souvenirs. What was taking place in front of him was light years beyond any such horrible defacement. In the early morning gloom, right in front of him, a thoroughly inconceivable event was playing out. Someone had managed to bring a spectacular wet saw and a variety of trucks to the site, and cut a 8-ft x 3 ft by 3/4 inch slab off of one of the stones. As he drove upon the scene, the hooligans had just finished loading it into a 4-wheel drive flatbed. Just as his headlights revealed the scene to him, the flatbed squealed its tires and sped away. The ranger stepped on the accelerator just as a gust of wind blew a path through the fog, which parted the clouds as the sun arose above the horizon. Several trillion photons struck him square in his optic nerves. He raised his hands to shield his eyes. His loosened grip on the steering wheel then let his front wheels slip in a rut, which pitched his vehicle into a ditch as the flatbed roared off into the distance.
* * * *
“We’ve narrowed it down to about two dozen candidates,” said the Director of National Intelligence Amanda Phelps just as Frank sat at the end of a long, exquisitely-polished conference table. The massive room where the Dave Location Committee had set up operations was crammed with people hunched over phones and computers, making phone calls, and barking orders at one another.
“You have?” asked Frank, surprised that the DNI had even noticed him come in. “I just heard one of your agents say hundreds of people are calling authorities all over the country, claiming they’re the one the aliens want to speak to. It’s taken you less than a day to winnow out the millions of Daves in the world down to 24 people?”
“Well, it’s not as hard as it sounds,” said the Director. “Most of those phone calls are from crazy people. Some even admit they’re not even named “Dave.” They refer to themselves as “spiritually Dave,” or something. Plus, an awful lot of calls from swamp country in Florida.”
Director Phelps handed a stack of folders, each with its own Top Secret cover sheet, to Agent Terminator, who then walked it over to Frank.
“Ouch,” muttered an analyst from somewhere behind Frank, presumably named Dave.
“What criteria did you use then?”
“Massive intellect, probably an astronaut or astrophysicist. We also considered philosophers and linguists.” Phelps gestured to the committee members. “Every agency pooled their collective resources to extract names of people that aliens might feasibly want to interact with. Named “Dave,” of course.”
Frank looked over his copies of the dossiers. David Ternny, astrobiologist. Davis McClain, exoplanet research. Dave Washington, theoretical astrophysics. Summaries of some of the world’s most brilliant minds lay before…
“‘Razorback?’ Who is…” he squinted, “Dave Mitchell? He looks, as much as anything, like someone you might see spray painting his teeth shiny silver.”
“Oh,” said a voice from behind Frank. “My department added him.”
Frank turned to see a wiry, older man with neat gray hair which provided an odd frame for his enormous and chaotic eyebrows. His badge indicated he was with the FBI.
“The dossier says he’s a mechanic,” said Frank. “As in…for satellites?”
“No. Kias, I believe.”
The room went quiet as the DSC wordlessly demanded an explanation.
“Mr. Dave Mitchell is an interesting fellow,” said FBI Assistant Director Eyebrows. “Up until this morning, he was part of the Witness Protection Program, which he entered because of his assistance in taking down a notorious biker gang, called the Black Sams.” Eyebrows nodded understanding as Director Phelps glared at her watch.
“The Black Sams were smugglers. They had their hands in everything, from exotic animals to rare works of art, to sophisticated weapons. It so happens one of their most unusual acquisitions over the years was a large segment of Stonehenge, which has in the past couple of decades been in the possession of one Sal Esposito.”
“What the…Stonehenge? Like, in England?”
“Well done, Dr. Lee,” replied Eyebrows coolly. “The very same.”
“The aliens are planning to communicate with Dave at the perihelion,” interjected Director Phelps. “We have reason to believe the contact will occur in the vicinity of Stonehenge.”
“And why do you think that?” asked Frank.
“That’s classified,” answered Phelps.
“Back to Dave Mitchell. You see, this morning, not 20 minutes after the media reported the Message, Mr. Mitchell vanished. And during normal times, the sudden disappearance of a WPP asset would have only caused your typical institutional panic.”
“Understandable,” said Frank. “And why did news of this disappearance make its way to the DLC?”
Eyebrows looked over the Director Phelps, who nodded.
“Ok, I admit that’s weird. But still…”
“And as of six hours ago, the ‘restaurant’ is missing as well.”
The comment didn’t make sense. But Frank chose to ask what he assumed was the easier question first.
“Why the air quotes?
“Welllll, we say restaurant,” replied Eyebrows, “but Sal named the place Sal’s Dive, as it was a bar. But the establishment has mutated into a variety of businesses over the years. At one time, he named it At the Office. And before that, it was To Get Some Groceries, which incidentally was my favorite.”
“All of which were the same dive bar, but Sal was the only one honest enough…”
“Excuse me, I hate to interrupt,” said Frank. “But why does the FBI, the CIA, and evidently the entire Intelligence Community know the history of a dirty bar outside Baltimore? And just how old is this Sal person? It sounds like he should be pushing 90 years old or so.”
The silence was disturbed only by the air conditioning.
“That’s also classified,” said Director Phelps. “Forget we mentioned it.”
Originally published at https://interestingtimesharold.substack.com.
