The Lure

28 Where Are They?

For an incredible second, she thought she glimpsed Logie Harris, the famous evangelist, through the trees. What is this, Jurassic Park? the Science Adviser asked herself. Surely Bull isn’t taking advice from that old dinosaur? But then the figure had gone and she carried on towards Laurel.

Hazel had always thought that the word ‘cabin’, applied to a building with three conference rooms and a mass of communications to the outside world, was stretching the English language a bit. Maybe, she surmised, it had been a cabin in the days when it had housed the Head of the Secret Service detail. But at least, unlike the Oval Office, the President’s office in Laurel Cottage was small and workmanlike.

The Chief sat behind his L-shaped desk with a computer and a clutter of papers. A man — a stranger — faced him across this desk, sitting uncomfortably upright. He was thin, intense, and looked as if he had slept in his cheap suit. He glanced briefly at Hazel and then looked away. Hazel thought that someone invited to the desk of the world’s most powerful man might at least have made an effort with the suit. Probably a bachelor, she guessed, living in some enclosed little world of his own.

The President waved in the general direction of the man. ‘Hazel, I want you to meet Professor Cardow, from Stanford. He’s with some think-tank which tries to predict future trends. He’s made a special study of the alien question — whether some day we’ll meet up with little green men.’ The thin man grinned nervously, stood up, touched Hazel’s extended hand briefly then sat down again. Hazel groaned inwardly. Another high-powered genius who couldn’t boil an egg.

‘Sit yourself down and listen to what the Professor has to say.’

Cardow glanced uncertainly between the President and his Scientific Adviser. His voice, when he spoke, was nasal and high-pitched. Hazel found it irritating almost from the first word. ‘I’ve been asked by the President to give an opinion on whether there’s intelligent life out there. My answer is No.’

‘And he can prove it with mathematical certainty,’ the President stated. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Stanford University, don’t let me do it again.’

Cardow resumed. ‘The problem is this, ma’am: where are they?’

Bull said, ‘That’s what I’ve been saying all along. Where are they?’

Hazel waited patiently. It occurred to her that Cardow, although addressing both the President and her, was avoiding eye-contact with both.

Cardow cleared his throat. ‘Given enough time, space travel is easy, Ms Baxendale. If we take the modern scientific age as having started with Newton’s law of gravity, we’re only four hundred years old. From the first Model T Ford to the International Space Station was only a hundred years — a human lifespan. It’s doubtful if there will ever be a time from now on when there isn’t a human being in space. And who knows how long our civilisation will last? Maybe another ten thousand years, maybe a million…’

Hazel shifted impatiently in her chair. ‘What’s your point, Professor?’

‘My point is that given a few million years, you can colonise the Galaxy easier than you can fall off a log. We’ve already sent the Pioneer spacecraft clean out of the Solar System. In another thousand years — in maybe a hundred years — we’ll have probes heading here, there and everywhere in interstellar space. Now there are a hundred billion stars out there and half of them are older than the Sun. Suppose there are civilisations out there millions of years old. Suppose there’s even one. It would have colonised the Galaxy long ago. We’d see plenty signs of it. The aliens would be here amongst us now. So where are they? If there was any intelligent life at all out there, the galaxy would be humming with radio signals. But all we hear is silence.’

‘You’re saying there’s nobody else in the whole Galaxy? We’re totally alone?’

‘Totally. We’re at the very beginning of our evolution as an intelligent species. Any other civilisation out there would be millions of years old, maybe tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions. It would have taken over long, long ago.’

‘Did I hear you say hundreds of millions? Civilisations hundreds of millions of years older than us?’ the President asked.

Cardow, still avoiding eye-contact with Hazel, turned to the President. ‘Mr President, any civilisation which takes the science route will explode in power. Look where we’ve reached in four hundred years. Where will we be in four thousand years? Or four million? And there are stars like the Sun four billion years older than us. Any intelligent life forms out there would have taken over our planet long ago, before there were even humans. But where are they? There’s no sign of them.’

Hazel tried a line she’d read somewhere: ‘So you said. But absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.’

‘But we have evidence,’ Cardow countered smoothly. ‘They’re not here.’

‘Let’s not get too smart,’ Bull growled.

Hazel felt her jaw tightening. ‘There’s got to be something wrong with that argument. We know the Sun is an ordinary star. We know planetary systems must be common. There must be Earth-like planets out there in their billions, lots of them with water. And where there’s water there’s every prospect that life will evolve.’ As soon as Hazel mentioned the word ‘evolve’, she remembered that the President was a creationist, almost felt his negative body language. Shit.

‘That’s the NASA line,’ Cardow was saying. A slightly peeved tone was creeping into his voice; Baxendale suspected the man didn’t like being contradicted. ‘They push sub-surface oceans on Europa and permafrost on Mars, make out you’re a screwball if you don’t believe that’s a recipe for life, and use the prospect of finding it to squeeze megabucks out of Congress.’ He turned to Bull again. ‘The fact is, Mr President, there’s every reason to believe we’re alone. Take the idea that life was created out of a primordial soup.’

‘Soup? Life created from soup?’ Bull looked incredulous.

‘A primordial soup, formed by a chance combination of molecules. Now we’re made up of proteins and a protein molecule is made up of dozens to hundreds of amino acids, put together in a particular order. Suppose the soup is full of these amino acids. If we were to randomly shuffle these amino acids to get the full range of proteins that life depends on … well, the odds against getting it right first time are one in ten to the power forty thousand.’ Cardow looked triumphantly across at Baxendale. ‘That’s a one followed by forty thousand zeros.’

‘Thank you, Professor, but as a past Vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences I have some familiarity with power notation.’

‘Can you put that in layman’s terms?’ Bull asked.

I thought I had, the Stanford man thought. ‘Ah, what it means is that there’s absolutely no chance that the process has been duplicated anywhere in the Galaxy or even anywhere else in the Universe. The odds are far too great.’

The President opened a drawer and pulled out a cheroot. ‘That’s pretty persuasive to me, Hazel. We’re one-offs, God’s creation. His little fallen angels.’

Cardow, having found his tongue, was becoming eloquent. The President leaned back and puffed in the air, letting the Stanford futurologist talk.

‘Even if life did develop somewhere, the odds that it would evolve to an intelligent state are astronomical. Evolution has more twists and turns than you can imagine. It took three billion years even to get to the stage of sponges. Compound the improbabilities and you see it’s a miracle that we’re here at all. We’re alone in the Universe. We’ve been brainwashed, not just by NASA, but by Hollywood. There’s no drama in Star Trek movies where the crew never meet an alien.’

‘No drama equals no bucks,’ Bull observed.

Cardow turned the knife: ‘The public has been duped into the expectation that the Universe is teeming with life, and it suits a lot of people, from movie producers to Californian scientists, to feed that expectation. But it’s a falsehood. Otherwise the aliens would be here.’

Hazel looked over at Bull. The President had a satisfied look, as if he’d just had a big poker win. ‘Mr President, the world’s full of cranks with axes to grind. I’ve never heard of this man. I’m your Science Adviser, dammit. It’s me you listen to.’

A little wisp of smoke was drifting up from the President’s cigar towards the ceiling. ‘But I think you just lost the argument. Stanford here has given us a two-pronged, watertight case. First, even if you believe in evolution which I don’t, the odds are billions to one against intelligent life emerging from primitive bugs. Second, if there was alien life it would be everywhere including here and it’s not. The arguments fit like two gloves.’ Bull leaned back in his swivel chair. ‘There are no aliens, not anywhere. But you see, Hazey, I already knew that. Little green men with pointy heads are unBiblical.’

‘Mr President, the seabed’s littered with ships that were thought to be watertight. I don’t know what Professor Cardow’s hang-up is, but he’s just fed you some very bad advice.’

Cardow’s lips tightened like a prim old woman’s, and he blushed an angry red.

‘Uhuh?’ Bull gave his Science Adviser a long, thoughtful stare. With his slightly hooked nose, she had the disconcerting feeling of being watched by an owl. ‘You need to unwind a bit, Hazey, that’s what this place is for. Come over about ten, and you and I’ll watch a movie.’

‘Why thank you, sir. You know that as a woman I can’t deal with the heavy issues. But I do appreciate a nice pat on the head.’ Baxendale said it with a big smile to show that she was joking. She gave Cardow a look of pure venom as she left, and the futurologist blushed again.

Big snowflakes were drifting down when Hazel trudged her way through six inches of snow to the Aspen Lodge. Footprints had preceded her.

Warm air and Latin-American rhythm enveloped her as she stepped inside. Along the corridor to the living room, Jet, the President’s black Labrador, sniffed at her trouser legs.

‘Come on in, Hazey, you’re just in time.’ The President, tieless and with his shirt hanging out, was dropping ice cubes into a cocktail shaker. Logie Harris was leaning back in an armchair, Coke in hand. He gave a tense little nod to Hazel.

‘Cha cha cha.’ Bull was nodding to the beat while expertly rattling the cocktail shaker over his shoulder. ‘Paid my way through Harvard doing this. Law student by day, barman by night. Never forgotten how to do it.’ He added the contents to tall ice-filled glasses, carefully trickled a red liquid into the drinks and delivered a multi-coloured liquid to Hazel. ‘Tequila sunrise. Guaranteed to put a smile even on the grim face of my Science Adviser.’

Hazel took a sip and smiled. Bull wagged a finger and gave an I-told-you-so grin. ‘Hell, you look beautiful when you smile. You know Logie?’

Harris stood up and extended a hand to Hazel. ‘I hear you crossed swords today.’

Hazel said, ‘Yes, with another backwoodsman.’ Harris’s face froze.

Bull crossed to a light switch and to Hazel the room fell dark for a few seconds, until her sight adapted to the gentle red glow of reflected firelight. Now a screen was coming slowly down from the ceiling, and the President was removing a painting to reveal a small alcove with a projector. A white-haired steward built the fire up with seasoned logs, and Jet stretched out in front of it. Hazel shared a settee with the President, while Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis shared misadventures with Marilyn Monroe on an overnight sleeper. Bull and Harris chortled through the movie, the President occasionally laughing out loud and slapping Hazel’s thigh.

As the closing credits rolled, she said, ‘I ought to go, Mr President.’

‘Have a nightcap, Hazey.’

‘No, thank you.’ She stood up. What made her say it she didn’t know; it just came out in a surge of anger. ‘Mr President, I see this alien message as a turning point for mankind. You can’t handle the issue by cutting yourself off, surrounding yourself with these people.’

‘These people?’ Bull’s tone was suddenly frosty.

Harris, on his feet, adopted a combative tone. ‘I for one thank God for the President’s wisdom. I don’t doubt your erudition, Ms Baxendale, but only arrogance can make us believe that infinite knowledge is given us.’

She said coldly, ‘I can’t argue with that.’

‘Then surely you can see that the origin of life is a domain that belongs to the Creator, not to man? And surely, unless you are godless, you must accept that God’s intentions are revealed to us through revelation?’

‘Now it gets complicated.’

Harris pounded on, a preacher with a congregation. ‘And the Scriptures are clear: only Man is made in the image of God. Therefore the only possible life forms beyond the Earth cannot be creatures of God. We must pay no heed to their siren message. We dare not.’

Hazel sighed. ‘I’ll wish you both goodnight.’

She turned at the door, said, ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ and slammed it shut.

Despair was settling over her like a cloak.

The snow had stopped, and between the clouds were stars, sharp and crystalline. Her ears were beginning to hurt with cold, and her fingers were tingling. She trudged down the steps and made her way on to a path between the trees. As she walked she looked up at a cold and alien sky, utterly unlike the haze which overlaid Washington D.C., orange like the cheeks of a pantomime tart.

Somewhere up there. Somewhere up there.

Maybe that bright star, or that one, maybe one of the thousands of lesser ones, going as faint as the eye could see and no doubt beyond. Maybe, even, the signallers came from someplace between the stars, from some dark interstellar realm.

There were animal tracks in the snow; small, clawed creatures. Her breath was steaming.

Someone had lit a fire in Maple Lodge; she saw its flickering light, and the smoke curling up from the chimney. Again she looked up at the myriad lights between the trees, each one a prodigious nuclear furnace, many with planets orbiting around them.

Where are you? Who are you? What do you want of us?

She shivered, and turned into the cabin. Inside, she paced up and down the corridor, baffled.

You have a Harvard law degree.

Sheer popularity swept you into your second term. You won support for the Poverty Bill against the conservatives, and by some miracle you even got the Environment Bill through while keeping the oilmen on board.

You’re handling the Iraqi crisis like a maestro.

You’re a miracle-worker, Seth.

She tossed her coat, hat and gloves on to the bed and marched angrily through to the small kitchen.

So why are you taking your advice on this paramount issue from screwballs, nuts and hillbillies?

She filled the kettle with icy water.

Is it conceivable that something deeper than Bible Belt fundamentalism is holding you back?

An incredible thought leaped into her head:

Is it conceivable, by any stretch of the imagination, that Cardow and Harris are right?

She paced up and down some more, looked at her watch, and picked up a telephone.