Chapter 2

Still April 3, 2247. Alister 5 reporting.

At 22:50, Commander C’Droit disappeared and the Crackpots dropped into a silence that lasted quite a while. “That was different than what I’d expected,” Suzi Craynet said, into the room. “Not that I really expected to have an alien appear in my living room.”

Santiago, an exobiologist, wondered, “What kind of being could represent itself in any form she chose? A shape-changer perhaps? Could I get a sample of her blood...?”

Adm. Harkness interrupted Santiago’s ruminations: “Raoul, that’s not even important, in the galactic sense of things. And I do mean galactic, literally. Your earlier comment was correct. The big interstellar powers are going to choke on this. Interstellar – HAH! It took a century to get a permanent multi-national base on the moon – not to mention the Sino-Indian base that’s on the far side.

“The US alone would ... God, the military would kill, literally, for their technology. An hour to get to Jupiter? We are just learning to crawl into space, and the – what did she call it? The Conferderation – is out there. Could be hundreds of planets. No. There has to be a way to keep the politicians away from this. But maybe this is the slap in the face they ALL need to make a global government.”

“Steve,” Suzi answered him. “If we try to force them into some sort of global government. Remember the United Nations? That turned into a speechifying useless club. Glad it went away in the 2060s. Nobody was paying attention to it. Like the Congress, only worse.” She paused for a second. “What ever happened to the OSS?”

“The OSS from WW II?” Harkness replied. “It turned into the CIA, then that turned into the National Security Group. Eventually, it was folded into the Presidential black ops group with no name. And now there are a hundred secret semi-military private companies, some are even global. Why? What are you thinking?”

Suzi poured herself a half-tumbler of scotch. “We need a ‘NO-SS’ now, combined with a ‘NO-BS’ group. Somebody that can do things without the rigamarole of dealing with politicians. And we need it starting from ‘immediately’ to ‘whenever the ultra-alien ship’ arrives.

“Alister,” she went on, “please contact Selvin and ask if The Confederation has had any messages coming from the inter-galactic ship on any frequency, in the past. Maybe we can start on decoding it.”

“Sending it now,” I replied. Almost immediatley Selvin answered with a multi-gigabite of data. “He has sent a boat-load – or should I say a spaceship-load – of gobblyed-gook data. Going through it now, there is nothing I can detect that makes sense. It’s undecipherable. If you want to see it, it’s on my memory in a file name ‘Space Messages.’ But it does not appear in any characters you can see. It’s kind-of like Morse Code, but with no discernable pattern.”