Gifts Differing

We assemble in one of Constellation’s conference suites, too few of us for the size of the room. There's a central table, pushed-back chairs, wallboards cluttered with diagrams, arcane symbols and graffiti – all the detritus from previous meetings.

I absently gather up used coffee cups and dump them in a bin, then call my little team to order. Jung: stereotypically brilliant, argumentative and intense. Latimer: the total introvert, quietly snarky. I outline the mission.

“There's still activity on the planetary far side, so this will be an opportunity for a second attempt at first contact. The question is, how should we go about it? Thoughts please, gentlemen?”

Jung’s eyes light up. “Tina, we’ve had completely the wrong approach up to now. We’ve treated this as a physical sciences problem. We’ve been obsessed with technology, reconnaissance and surveillance techniques. Wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s a psychological problem and we need to find out what makes them tick!”

I nod approvingly – we could all do with some new thinking.

“So what are you saying, we should psychoanalyse them?”

“He’s saying we should test them,” says Latimer.

Addressing Jung, he adds with a faint smile, “I suppose you’ll be wanting their IQs, right?”

Jung is getting excited “The whole thing,” he explains. “IQ, personality inventory, motivations, objectives. Everything.”

I feel warmed by his excitement. So different from the usual military coolness, their low-level brutality in relationships. I catch Latimer’s sardonic smile from the corner of my eye and feel my face redden.

“Great idea, Jung, if they were human patients of yours,”  Latimer says.

Latimer has a line in sarcasm. Why does he so delight in throwing cold water on other people’s creativity?

“Being as we have no idea,” he continues “as to what kind of thing they even are, and I am damn sure they don’t speak English, I really wonder how you propose to get us even started?”

Time to reclaim control of my meeting.

“This is exactly what we been brought here to figure out,” I say. “Jung’s idea is great, if we can just work out how to operationalise it”.  I am so pleased at the last bit: it always delights me to slip a piece of military jargon in.

And so we get down to it.

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How do you find out which food an animal prefers? It can't tell you in English. So you set up a T-junction. Go left and you enter a room with the first food; go right you enter an identical room with the second food. Let the animal explore the options. After a while it always goes to the food it prefers. Reverse the rooms to correct for left-right bias.

Now the animal has told you. And that's the principle Jung is appealing to.

The first thing we need to establish is what the aliens like, and what they don’t like. Every entity needs energy and the frigid planetary surface doesn’t provide much, so our first 'food' will be a 'soccer ball' with an embedded energy source making the whole thing ‘comfortably warm’ - whatever that means to them.

We want them to see this offering as an asset not a threat. So we’re having a set of balls made up, powered at different temperatures. I think of them as our ‘nice foods’.

The ‘apparent threat’ will be our second set of balls - things the aliens almost certainly won't like. They’re the same size but instead of balmy thermal emission they'll be radioactive. Alpha, beta and gamma – a ball for each. They're our controls.

The experiment is simplicity itself. The six balls: three assets - cool, warm & hot, and three threats - beta, alpha & gamma emitters, will be placed in a frame to be robotically-towed across the terminator to the alien site. The balls themselves are not wired, no tricks. Of course the frame itself will be instrumented to the nines.

And we’ll sit back and watch.

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While we were doing our experimental psychology and getting the go-ahead to manufacture our apparatus, Constellation had been busy with further reconnaissance. Given the alien propensity to swat our active surveillance out of the sky, we were reduced to fuzzy sensing from artificial quakes induced on the planetary surface and point-source neutrino tomography. Resolution was always going to be a stretch.

We could, however, detect distinctive shapes moving in the topography of craters, outcrops and nitrogen geysers on the far side. The Admiral gave final authorisation for our mission (without hiding his conviction that it was a complete waste of time - he was old school). Without further ado we crack the metaphorical champagne and send our Trojan gift to the opposition.

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As we watch the telemetry on Constellation, I monitor reactions from my little team.

Jung chatters away like an excitable bird, speculating that of course they’ll prefer the warm sphere, hoping they won’t feel threatened by the radiation sources (the levels are not exceptionally dangerous) and wondering how long it will take before they react. Latimer is the complete opposite, communing with the computer systems in silence. His augmentations may come in handy - if we can formulate the situation sufficiently precisely.

As the gift-bearing frame approaches its target, less than a kilometre from the computed centre of alien activity, its cameras register indistinct shapes nestled on the surface, They remind me of partially constructed pyramids or ziggurats. There’s some indication of smaller, moving entities but no two shapes seem the same.

Our telemetry begins to fail. The balls are definitely in motion, apparently of their own volition – unfortunately for us, the aliens seem to be taking all of them!

The dataflow suddenly gets a lot worse and our screens blank. We exchange glances. Jung recalls an old line from experimental psychology: “We set the apparatus up with care, define the protocol with extreme precision .. and then the animal just does whatever it likes.”

We look at each other - what now? No-one seems inclined to break the silence.

Suddenly we hear a crisp voice on Constellation's command channel.

“Four hundred kilometres out, four point three kilometre per second. Five objects on impact trajectory.”

Latimer  says absently “The Admiral’s got time to burn. Constellation’s lasers will blow them out of the sky. They’re suborbital”. He’s still plugged in, reading targeting data from the main battle computer.

“Looks like they wanted just the one of our gifts,” he adds, “so they sent the other five back.”

The one they like is the hard-gamma emitter.

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© Nigel Seel, June 2018.

This story has a sequel: Space Opera.

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