Joe Haldeman - The Coming

“I’m a teacher. I usually go live.”

She smiled and pushed a button on her phone. “Fez, this is Marya. Scramble.” She pushed another button. “Loud and clear. Look, you got the feds there? Figures. Look, I’ve got a White House angle that we don’t want reviewed; they’d gut it or even cancel it.” She nodded. “Dr. Bell down here talked with LaSalle and Pauling this morning. Can you give me five live ninety seconds after the hour?” She laughed. “Owe you one, babe.” She set the phone down and looked at the cameraman. “You didn’t hear that, right?”

“Hear what?” Deeb said.

“Yeah, well, go take a leak for about a minute. Be back by two.” They hustled out. “Rory, the broadcasts are going through a White House censor with a five-second delay. What they can do in New York is accidentally push the wrong buttons and leave the room. So this interview, scheduled for seven, comes in live instead, on a circuit that’s not controlled by the White House remote.

“I don’t know how long we’ll have before they’re able to cut us off. So I’ll ask the most important questions first.”

“We might not even get on,” Rory said. “This room is probably bugged by the CIA.”

“Hmm. They probably wouldn’t have anybody live listening in, though. We’ll find out.” The two men came back in and she whistled the cameras to start. She looked at the main camera. “We’re going to take five minutes, commencing fourteen-oh-one-thirty.”

Rory twisted around to look at the clock and then settled into an interviewee posture.

Marya faced the camera and her expression became serious, then grim: “Good evening. This is Marya Washington coming to you from Gainesville, Florida. This afternoon I talked with Professor Aurora Bell, who is chief administrator of the Committee on the Coming.

“This morning, Dr. Bell had a VR conference call from the White House. Were there other witnesses to the call, Professor?”

“Oh, yes. The governor of Florida, the chancellor of this university, and… another professor. And science adviser Grayson Pauling.”

“Did anything happen between the president and Pauling that might have presaged today’s tragic events?”

“In retrospect, yes.” She shook her head at the memory. “She blew up at him. At all of us, actually.”

“What did you say?”

“LaSalle talked about orbiting three antimissile weapons, to destroy the alien spaceship if it made a wrong move. I think it was the DOD’s idea, but she was behind it a hundred percent.

“This was before the new message came in. Even so, we argued that it would be suicide. The aliens’ technology is so superior to ours that we would be like mice attacking an elephant. Ants.”

Rory’s phone was buzzing; she took it out of her pocket and skimmed it across the room.

“And Pauling was on your side?”

“As any reasonable person would be. She was annoyed at him, and then openly angry. Pauling implied that the rationale for orbiting these weapons was to have them flying over Europe. Over France, in case we did decide to enter the war. If the war happens.”

“Do you agree?”

“I don’t know much about politics. If I were French I’d be nervous. But the issue isn’t Earth politics.”

“Especially in light of the new message.”

“If they believe it. The president didn’t.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Oh yes. She called me back, right after the new message came out.”

“Really!”

“She was mad as a hornet. ‘I don’t know how you did it, but it’s not going to work.’”

“Well, the timing is interesting.”

“Yes, but nobody on Earth could have done it. The signal started our way long before the conference call.”

“We’re off,” Deeb said. “We had a second of white noise, and they cut to a commercial.”

“Well, shit. Erase it back to Dr. Bell saying ‘conference call,’ and we’ll continue as if nothing’s happened. Okay?”

“Sure,” Rory said. “It might be aired eventually.”

“By historians.”

“In five,” Deeb said, holding out five fingers and folding them one at a time.

“Well, suppose the president were right, and it was a hoax. The hoaxers—one of whom would have to be you, or someone else who witnessed the conference call, could have had the second message made up long ago, and just signaled for it to be sent.”

“But not from way beyond the solar system. It would take more than a day for the signal to get there, and more than a day for the message to get back. Parallax on the signal—comparing the angle of it from two different positions—proves how far away the aliens are.”

“But a really paranoid person would point out that we have to take your word for that—yours and some other scientists’ on the Moon. They could be in on it, too.”

Rory smiled. “You could have said that, a month or two ago. But now it’s close enough for two sites on Earth to triangulate it. It’s a little fantastic to think of a conspiracy involving every astronomer in the world.” Off-camera, Marya nodded to Deeb.

“Don’t think nobody will suggest it, Dr. Bell. So… would you have any advice for President Davis?”

“Only the obvious: listen to the experts. LaSalle’s problem, and finally her undoing, was that she surrounded herself with yes-men, and then followed their advice when they parroted her views.”

“Pauling the exception.”

“Which became obvious. She might have saved her life by replacing him. Though as Pauling said in his… suicide note, she would have died a month later, along with the rest of humanity.”

“And suppose Davis does follow her example, and orbits these weapons?”

“I suspect the aliens won’t even bother demonstrating with Phobos. They’ll just destroy us out of hand.”

“A terrible thing to contemplate… thank you, Dr. Bell, for being with us on this strange and awful day. This is Marya Washington, reporting from Gainesville, Florida.”

“Out,” Deeb said.

“Just wrap it and send it on up with no comment,” Marya said. “As if.”

“You’re going to be in real trouble over this,” Rory said.

“All of us. Maybe they’ll put up a statue someday.” She shook a pill out of a vial and took it with the ice water.

She leaned back. “Off the record. It could work, couldn’t it?”

“The maser weapon? It’s never really been tested.”

“I mean in principle. It goes at the speed of light, right? The alien ship wouldn’t have any warning.”

“Assuming there’s only one alien ship, and the beam doesn’t miss, and they don’t have any defense against twenty-first-century weapons. A lot of assumptions.”

“Just trying to look at the bright side.”

“Oh, yeah.” Rory crossed the room and picked up her buzzing phone. “Buenas.”

It was the chancellor. “Rory, what did you do? The governor’s been on the phone screaming at me. He wants you fired immediately, yesterday!”

She played dumb. “Because of this morning?”

“He just saw you on the cube. Says you betrayed him and the country and the sacred memory of the president. Divulged top secret information.”

“I don’t have clearance to get top secret information. Was this an interview?”

“Yes, with that black New York woman.”

“Well, I did an interview. But it won’t be aired until seven o’clock tonight.”

“That might be what they told you. But the governor sure as hell saw it.”

“So I’m fired? Just like that?”

“No, no. But I have to give you a sabbatical, get you out of the public eye. Out of the line of fire.”

“No longer head of the committee?”

“No. In fact, off the committee altogether. You have other things to pursue—go do them until mid-January. Full pay. You don’t have any classes this semester?”