O'Malley's Choice

O’Malley’s Choice

“Houston, we have a problem.” Lieutenant Lawrence murmured the words as he turned to Commander O’Malley, sitting beside him.  They were first words either of them had spoken for the last five minutes as they had watched, or rather stared, out of the window of their orbiter, Promise, at the rectangular object several hundred feet away. It had come into view from out of the darkness of space, its apparently polished surfaces having caught their attention as it flashed reflections of the sun. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?” Lawrence added.

“Only if it’s a problem,” O’Malley answered, looking out the window.

“What do you think it is?”

The commander shook his head; he didn’t know. But his sense of the thing—the sense which they had both felt, not without alarm—was that this object was “different,” and indeed not supposed to be there.

O’Malley called the Space Control Center, which wasn’t in Houston but at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He did this through the encrypted communications channel he had been instructed to use in case anything “out of the ordinary” came up. He spoke to the Mission Director, May Friedman, and asked her, first, if Control was tracking anything in the area of the orbiter, and, when she told him it wasn’t, he responded, “Well, guess what? We’ve got something out there, and it’s close. Take a look at it. Maybe you can identify it for us.” The orbiter’s cameras were turned onto the object, and the video stream, also encrypted, was routed to Friedman’s workstation at the Center. She and the two engineers beside whom she worked leaned in toward her monitor to see the strange object, which looked like no space junk or part of a spacecraft which they knew of. They looked at one another not so much questioningly as apprehensively: it was so odd—it was so perfectly rectangular—clearly, it was a manufactured object. Secretly each of them felt a little thrill at the fantastic nature of the find, but May Friedman was concerned about security. She leaned in to the engineer at her side, in charge of all communications channels, and instructed him, “Nobody knows about this but us three. Understand?  I’ll take this up in my office.”

Once there she requested the presence of two persons who worked at Control. One of them was John Mason, a middle-aged, very proper and corporate-looking fellow, who was the liaison between the space program and the Pentagon. The other was Dr. Paul Franz, only twenty-eight years old, a graduate of MIT, and a prodigy of electrical engineering who had been one of the chief architects of the orbiter. He had only been with the agency three years. He was very skinny, his head was very big, and he looked like a ruddy-cheeked adolescent, but he could—as May had once told a friend at a cocktail party—“build a spaceship out of tin cans.”

When they came to her office she told them that Promise had come across something “unusual” and wanted their opinion about what they thought it was. She showed them the feed from the spacecraft on the monitor in her office. The rectangular object was yet closer to the spacecraft.  Lieutenant Lawrence on the orbiter had zoomed the camera into it, revealing various symbols on its surface. They were not letters or any human language, nor anything recognizable. Mason and Franz stood in silence, watching the monitor.

“Any idea what it is, gentlemen?” May asked, with a slight frown, for she was pretty certain they didn’t know anything more about it than she did.

“It’s come from somewhere else, obviously,” Franz said.

“From where?” Mason asked. But in the next moment he had caught Franz’s meaning, and looked at the Control Director uncomfortably.

Another pressing thought had occurred to the young scientist. He looked to May and asked, “Where is the Tanxian?”—referring to the Chinese orbiter which was in space at the same time with Promise. The Control Director caught his meaning. She got on the intercom with one of the flight coordinators in charge of tracking and asked him the same question. He responded that the Chinese spacecraft was on the other side of the earth but that it would come into view of the American craft in less than two hours. 

“That settles it,” Franz said, decisively. “We need to take it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mason said, quietly yet authoritatively, as though he were the voice of mature reason. “We don’t know what it is.”

“We know what it’s not,” Franz retorted. “It’s not a satellite, and it’s not space junk. It doesn’t belong to us, or to the Chinese or the Russians or anyone else. Those markings on the side are clearly some kind of language, and that’s no language from earth.”

Mason disregarded him and said to May, “The first thing we need to do is inform the Pentagon, then the White House.”

“For what?” Franz asked.

“So that we have clear instructions about what to do,” Mason answered, his bearing quite proper.

 “We don’t have time for that,” Franz said. He addressed May:  “This is not the time to get involved in a bureaucratic runaround. We don’t want the Tanxian seeing that thing. I’m betting that it’s alien and I say we take it.”

Director Friedman understood and largely agreed with what her chief engineer had said. But her primary concern had always been for the safety of the astronauts in their mission. She knew the men on that ship—just as she knew all the astronauts she had worked with—and she was not so eager to take a chance on their lives. She said, “We don’t know what it is, Paul. What if it’s dangerous?”

­—At which Franz looked at her rather in disbelief. His voice was never more earnest, or mature sounding, than in what he said next:

“What do you mean, if it’s ‘dangerous’? Every time we send people into space it’s dangerous. We all know that. The men on the ship know that. But we’re not here to play it safe. We’re here to explore—to learn—maybe to discover something from another world. May, this is the kind of thing we could only dream of! We can’t afford to let this opportunity pass us by.  And we can’t afford to tie our hands by getting the Pentagon or the White House involved. The Chinese are going to see that thing as well as we do, and they’re not going to waste time deciding whether or not they should grab it. They’ll go for it. The only question is, Do they get it, or do we?”

When the situation was put into that stark and pressing light, even Mason held his peace and merely looked at Friedman as though to leave the decision up to her. She didn’t have to think about it long. Pressing a button on the intercom on her desk, she spoke to the Communications Director, and once he came on she asked that he patch her with a secure line to Promise. It was O’Malley she spoke to.

“Jack, we think it might be alien. The Tanxian will be coming up on the horizon in less than an hour and a half, and they’ll able to see it too. We’d rather take it before they get a look at it. But since we don’t know what it is … well, we don’t know how much risk is involved.”

“Do you want us to get it?”

“Considering that there’s a risk … we’re going to leave that up to you,” Friedman said. But she was not satisfied with her answer. She was thinking about what Franz had said, and she added, “But it looks like something we might want to have.”

“Then we’ll get it,” O’Malley said.

In the cockpit Lawrence looked at O’Malley in blank misgiving and asked, “Are you sure we want to do that?”

A little nervously O’Malley scratched his cheek, then smiled wryly at Lawrence and said, “You heard her. They think it’s alien. I think it is too. What do you think we should do?”

Lawrence looked away thoughtfully, then nodded, affirmatively; indicating that he agreed with the conclusion about the origin of the object, and that as a scientist he could not in good conscience abandon such a remarkable find. Nevertheless he sounded almost resigned, as though he were force into a concession, when he said, “Alright—let’s go for it.”

Lawrence was the primary navigator and he positioned the Promise closer to the object. Slowly, carefully, skillfully—with the lightest touches of the thruster controls—in a maneuver taking up forty minutes—he positioned the craft twenty feet “beneath” the object. In the cockpit he and O’Malley heard the whir of the electric motors as the bay doors were opened; but in the vacuum of space they silently bloomed up and outward like the graceful petals of some huge metal flower.  From out of the cargo bay extended two robotic arms. Lawrence maneuvered these also, slowly and carefully. Gently they came together on either side of the object, pressing against it lightly, then drawing it inward a few fractions of an inch at a time. In a half hour it had been gathered into the cargo bay, the doors of which were just closing upon it when the Tanxian peeped up over the horizon of the world. The Chinese spacecraft looked similar to the American, and indeed its design had been copied, some said through industrial espionage. A few minutes later an official from China’s space control was on the phone with Director Friedman in Florida inquiring about the unexpected location of the Promise. Was there a problem? Was any help needed? Friedman told him that they had done an unscheduled test of the thrusters because of a “system alert,” but that the problem had been resolved—and thank you for your concern.

The cargo bay of the Promise was pressurized and the atmosphere within stabilized. Sensors there detected no radiation emanating from the object, which the robotic arms continued to hold stationery and weightless a few feet above the floor. The astronauts looked at it for a few minutes in the monitor surveilling the cargo bay. 

“Jeeze,” Lawrence said. Now that he no longer had to concentrate on navigating or controlling the robotic arms, he could allow himself to the luxury of regarding the object emotionally: and it filled him with open-mouth astonishment.

“I’m going back to take a look at it.”

Lawrence nodded and said, “Be careful.”

“Where are the ray guns when you need them, right?” O’Malley joked: but there was an undertone of nervous seriousness in his words.

He floated weightlessly to the back of the large cockpit and opened the hatchway to the aft compartment before the cargo bay. At the large oval hatchway he floated a few seconds before a small window through which he could see the object, and for the first time he felt some fear; nevertheless, he disregarded it and continued on, opening the hatch, moving through it, then closing it behind him. He glided the ten feet which separated him from the object. It was some fourteen feet long, five wide, and five high; perfect in all proportions; the surface dull gray, and not polished but matte. It seemed to be very heavy and perhaps weighed tons, and the commander was alarmed to think that Promise might not be able to land with such a load. He moved to its side and saw the symbols running along the bottom of it: pictographs of geometrical shape etched into the surface, none of them however resembling anything he was familiar with. Then he noticed a faint line, a seam, running around the object about a third of the way down from the top.

“Are you alright in there?” Lawrence asked over the intercom, as he watched O’Malley on camera.

“Yes, everything’s fine.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“Not one.”

“Is it metal?”

O’Malley hesitated to touch it, but forced himself to do so, gingerly, at first with only a fingertip, then with several.

“It’s either metal or … maybe ceramic. It’s cool to the touch—”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the heard the faint sound of suction, as when a vacuum seal is broken, and saw that the thin line of the seam had widened. Then there were more sounds, a loud series of clicks, and the top of the object had somehow pulled apart and retracted into the sides, revealing what lay inside.

His first thought was that it was some kind of large weird doll. At the same time he knew it was not inanimate but a being. It had a face, though not human. Its head was triangular, rather flat across the top and coming down to a pointed chin. Its large eyes were closed, showing only two fleshly slits, and above them dramatic thick brows stretched up and outward. Its nose was very thin and drooped slightly at the tip, and beneath it was a small, protruding, somehow swollen-looking mouth almost perfectly round. It was wearing a loose-fitting but shiny uniform with some kind of insignia, consisting of two yellow interlocking hollow circles, on the barrel-like chest. The uniform rose in a cowl around the creature’s head, from which, here and there, light brown hair or fur stuck out. It lay there still.

O’Malley had frozen with terror. An objective part of himself understood that he was paralyzed by fear, and he wondered at the fact that he was now experiencing something which he had only heard and read about. As he floated there, eye-level with the top of the object and in clear close sight of its occupant, he could not move his arms or legs, and indeed he was holding his breath as though the autonomous muscles controlling his diaphragm had ceased to work. But his terror catapulted when he saw the closed eyes open. They were huge, slightly protuberant, and as black as onyx. They stared upward at the cargo bay for a few seconds. A cream-colored nictating membrane blinked over them a few times. The creature turned its head to the left and right a little before it noticed O’Malley, at whom it looked blankly.

“Jack, get out of there!” 

—It was Lawrence’s voice coming through on the intercom. He had seen this unexpected resuscitation and was also frightened by it. The creature heard the human’s the voice on the intercom, and momentarily shifted his eyes away from the commander in order to find the source of the sound. But then it turned its attention back to O’Malley and lifted and placed its hands—they were pad-like and wrinkled, with four thick digits each—onto the sides of the enclosure, and began lifting itself up.

“Jack, get out of there!”

 Lawrence’s impulsive voice brought the commander to himself somewhat, and, with his heart pounding furiously, he moved away from the creature and its encasing object, making his way back toward the aft cockpit section of the orbiter. When he had gained that chamber, he closed the hatch behind him and turned hard and fast the crank handle by which it engaged the bulkhead.  There was no locking mechanism and O’Malley angrily wondered how the designers of the hatch could have omitted something so necessary. Then he went to the next hatch before the cockpit, passed through it and closed it tightly behind him, and rejoined Lawrence, floating up to him from behind and looking over his shoulder at the cargo bay monitor.

The creature was sitting up in its enclosure. It was clearly confused as to its whereabouts, for it continued to look about uncertainly. Then its round protruding mouth moved and it emitted a series of staccato warbling sounds: it was speaking. If the human beings could have understood its language they would have learned that it was from another part of the galaxy, that its spacecraft had failed catastrophically, and that it had ejected itself in this life-saving pod, which was programmed to open only when it detected a livable atmosphere.  How long ago that had been—whether ten days or ten thousand years—the creature itself could not have said.

“I don’t know what the hell that is,” Lawrence said, nervously, staring at the monitor, “but I say we get rid of it now.”

—O’Malley heard the suggestion and was inclined to agree, if only because it was the safest course of action. He seemed to nod affirmatively, yet even as he did so a memory ocurred to him. He saw himself as a boy in Kansas who, on summer nights, would steal out of the house to stand in a nearby corn field and look up at the million stares swirling overhead. He remembered what he had felt at those times: a strange, magical sense that there were other “people” out there—people like him, or not, but who were, at that very moment, looking up at their skies and thinking the same thing he was. Thus as he looked at the monitor he was not seeing the creature so much as he was seeing himself all those years ago. He told Lawrence, whose hands were moving toward the switches which would open the cargo bay doors:

“Wait!”

“Wait for what?”

—Rather than answer, O’Malley put out his hands against the back of the seat of his fellow astronaut and pushed himself away, spinning halfway around and as he began making his way to the aft compartment of the orbiter, saying, “I’m going back to the cargo bay.”

“Are you out of your mind!”

“Just do me a favor. Don’t open the bay doors while I’m in there! Remember, there’s no air in space.”