The Discoverers

"O....my....God! Carl, you gotta see this!!" Steven yelled to his colleague, his face having just morphed from confusion to disbelief to enthusiastic joy in a matter of seconds. It sank in even deeper just what he was looking at on the telemetry. "Carl! Carl, get in here, this is amazing! Unbelievable!" Carl finally came from the next room, looking mildly agitated and wondering what could possibly be worth so much excitement. Steven had never been one to go overboard with emotion, and Carl couldn't help feeling a bit annoyed. "What's going on? I was in the bathroom."

Steven Hegel looked more like a mad scientist than a respected one, with a splotchy, pock-marked face, and curly red hair crouching over a severely receding hairline. Carl Strickland's appearance was quite different than Steven's, and yet no more stereotypically un-scientific; he was more like a muscle-bound California beach bum, with below shoulder-length hair and a perfect tan. At 43 years old, Steven was quite a few years older than Carl, yet currently worked under him on this Space Watch project, which was privately funded and directed by one Albert Englebrecht, once a technologies billionaire, now a serious Space spender.

Steven looked around at Carl with a huge, uncharacteristic smile, which he couldn't have wiped off his face to save his life. "You're never gonna believe this, Carl," he said with an awed chuckle, "It's freakin' amazing!" Steven moved aside to reveal the telemetry monitor behind him. He slowly began, as if breathless, "There are fourteen massive objects that are approaching the moon's orbit," and at this he leaned in and lowered his voice, "this appears to explain that strange phenomena around Neptune's orbit from a few months ago." He fixed Carl an intense stare, and continued solemnly, "These could only be spacecraft of some kind."

Carl coughed a quick laugh, but recovered with a confused look. "Let me see," he said calmly, not as though disbelieving his colleague, but just to confirm. Steven pointed at the screen. "Seven of them appear to be the size of cities," he measured out, now speaking in a serious, awed, almost nerve-broken voice: the implications were setting in. "This is big...really big...fate of humankind kinda stuff...we should probably call the President or the Department of Defense or something."

Carl stared at the screen for a moment, looked at Steven, then turned around. "Let's start with Al," he said confidently, "He can make the big calls." Carl strode out of the room into the office, where he could make a private call. He could have used the phone in the tech room, but felt the need for some bat-phone-like secrecy. Steven continued to monitor the screen, thinking about the distance from Neptune's orbit to the Moon, and how quickly these objects covered that space in a matter of months. "These aliens...(that just sounds freaky)," he thought, "are making a beeline for us."

As Carl dialed Al's number, he was unusually calm for someone reporting such an earth-shattering discovery. Maybe it was because it was not his find: Steven would get the credit for this, unless of course somewhere else on the planet some other watcher of the skies saw it first. It wasn’t likely though, since Space Watch was partnered with all other major agencies to monitor specific areas of space at specific times. Al wasn't likely to answer on the first ring at 3am, but Carl began to wonder after about ten rings. He knew Al didn't use voice mail on this line precisely for this reason - if they called him, it would be a real emergency. The weak, tired "hello" came after the fourteenth ring or so, and Carl began calmly, understanding that he had just woken his employer from a deep sleep. "Al....Carl here...um, Steven just found something incredible here," he began, and reported what he knew.

When Carl returned to the main room, Steven was still looking at the screen. "Al is on his way. He should be here in about 20 minutes." Steven nodded, lost in a maze of thoughts about what this find meant for them. So much speculation had spurned so many fictional accounts of what was now about to be acknowledged as a reality. Why were these spacecraft headed toward Earth? Did the beings aboard them intend to help the human race, or to conquer it? Were there, in fact, any beings aboard them? Perhaps they were coming for some other purpose altogether, and cared not a bit for us. Steven spoke after an uncomfortable pause. "Exciting stuff, huh?" He didn't sound convinced.

"Where are they now?”
"They're still moving toward us. No telling how long they've been in the local area."
"Right. Wonder if Al will get here before they do."
"I hope so...for some reason."

Al was always in command. This was his project. He hired all of the scientists himself. Every major decision to be made was run by him first, even ones that depended on scientific facts and principles he didn't really fully understand. He had a basic and fairly broad understanding of the science - astronomy and astrophysics in particular - but he was more the director of operations than anything else. He let his team filter the hard science through to him as needed.

It's Al's birthday weekend," Carl stated. "63 years old." This thought struck Steven as odd given the gravity of the current situation, and he nodded acknowledgment, but said nothing. Carl looked at him, and gave a slight frown, a kind of pout of resignation. "We should check to see if anyone else has this," Carl said blankly, and he grabbed the lab phone. As the number rang, Steven looked at the telemetry again, noting once more with amazement the advancing crafts' progress, and feeling anxious for what may be in store for those on Earth.

"Hello Ray, it's Carl at Space Watch. Uh...," he began rather uncomfortably, "How do I start? Steven has readings of massive objects - spacecraft of some sort - nearing the Moon."
Carl's body language gave no sign of the response he was getting on the other end. The only animation at all was his blinking eyes. Ten seconds or so later, Carl continued with a kind of quick grunt, "It's 14 huge...uh...spaceships, I guess, some are 10-15 miles in diameter, heading directly for us. If they hold trajectory, they'll be here in about15 minutes."

The fact that Ray didn’t know pretty much confirmed Steven's entry into history as The Discoverer of the first documented alien contact - well, that is, if it, in fact, was going to be documented. Telemetry doesn't lie, but in interpreting exactly what one is seeing on it, one isn't guaranteed to have reality match up with it completely. It also wasn't entirely certain that these spacecraft would stop, or that they would seek to make contact. Anything could happen at this point.

Steven broke the few minutes of silence that set in after Carl's phone conversation with an update. "It seems like they've slowed a bit. It would make sense if we're their target." Carl looked serious, but had no comment. He paced a slow, irregular orbit around Steven's desk at the telemetry readout. At last he stopped, then asked simply, "Shouldn't Al be here by now?" Steven looked at the time on the readout. "No, probably not for another 5 minutes." As if in reply to Steven and Carl's conversation, the phone rang.

Al had a problem with his car. He had been only 3 minutes away from his home when the car rather mysteriously shut off. Luckily, he knew car engines, and even luckier, his car was an old one, predating computer chip automobile technology. He opened the hood, checked a few things, and after trying to start it again, it surprisingly idled but sounded really rough. He knew that sound, though.  He quickly opened the carburetor, adjusted the relative fuel to air ratio, and was back on the road. Apparently Al had meant to make the big calls on the way, but had not done so. Carl assured him that by now the big calls were being made by others.

With only possible minutes until the arrival of the first outside contact with another galactic, or intergalactic, resident, Carl finally showed signs of nervousness. His breathing increased, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He paced even more frantically than before, while Steven remained seated at the telemetry desk, focused intently on the incoming readings.

"Of all the billions of planetary systems in the Milky Way," Carl said, breaking another long silence, "they have to pick ours." Steven's reply, "Maybe intelligent planetary life is, in fact, comparatively rare," was fairly devoid of emotion, almost robotic, as he sat concentrating on the data before him.

"Where do you think they'll go first? Do you suppose they have advanced information on what, where, or who, the power seats are?" Carl's questions were thoughtful, but hit Steven as being rhetorical. Steven made no reply, but rose from the desk and paused for quite a long time. He turned, finally, and began to walk out of the room. "Steven," Carl called, his eyes following him curiously, "Are you ok?" Steven stopped, then said simply, "There's a full moon tonight. I wonder if we'll see anything...or hear anything... outside." After a pause, he turned to Carl and continued, "They'll likely be orbiting within minutes."

Carl wondered at Steven's change in mood. He was very suddenly somber, or at least it seemed to Carl. Perhaps, he thought, Steven is depressed; maybe he expects the worse.
Carl followed Steven outside, and catching up with him, tried to be upbeat. "Everything's going to be ok, you know. I mean what are the chances they'll be," he chose his words carefully, finally adding with a chuckle, "nefarious, huh?" Steven looked pointedly into Carl's eyes, a sobering, serious look, and then unexpectedly smiled, "I'd say about 50%," he said simply, and then gazed upward at the moonlit sky.

There were quite a few large Cumulo-Nimbus clouds in the eastern sky, which was their vantage point. The clouds were pretty far away, leaving a great portion of sky exposed to the stars. The tree lined road that led away from the building snaked down the hills toward the town several miles away. Al would be coming up that road soon, having driven from his home beyond the town. Carl looked for car lights in the landscape, while Steven's attention remained fixed on the skies.

The two men stood quietly, patiently awaiting arrivals, for several minutes. Suddenly Steven smacked Carl on the arm, startling him, and then pointed at the sets of lights speeding through the night sky. Carl's attention refocused, neither of them noticed the car's lights heading up the road toward them, but still a few miles away.

Within seconds after spotting the alien crafts' approach, albeit the nearest ones potentially dozens of miles East of them, the scientists tensed up, hearing far off explosions. They saw some beams of light emanating from some of the crafts, pointed toward the ground. There was no telling how many craft there were in this area, as perhaps there were smaller ships that emerged from within the larger ones. Steven wondered if more were attacking other continents, other countries, other communities, other people. Carl's heart raced with the realization that this was most likely the end of human life, or at least the end of their reign on Earth.

The ground beneath them was rumbling and shaking, and the sound of the increasing frequency of explosions was far away, like stampedes of herds of every animal on Earth at once, with, most likely, the toppling of countless huge buildings in every major city. Steven and Carl did not panic. They stood their ground, shaking and all, although thoughts were streaming through their minds chaotically: wives and girlfriends, children and best friends, from the most  important work in their lives back to their slumming-it high school first jobs, from extended family to despised enemies. Fiction and reality became mixed up in their memories, with them cast as major characters and minor men. It was increasingly difficult for them to recognize their own existence in the crush of this panic.

Their last memory was of falling. As Al's car came around the earth-quaked final bend in the dirt road, a crack in the Earth swallowed his car and continued to spread toward the two scientists, the discoverers of the destroyers of Earth and of all of humanity.

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