O'Malley's Choice

Commander O’Malley liked to look out the window: not downward, toward earth, that blue and white-swirled glowing ball beneath him, but always outward into far space, there where the moon was (when it was visible) or far further beyond the region where it hung, to the innumerable points of light, the stars. This was his third trip into orbit and he never got tired of looking into space, partly because he had even now, at thirty-four years old, a boy’s fascination with it, and partly because he knew he might not have many more opportunities to go into it. Despite his experience and rank there were dozens of astronauts waiting for their chance to go into orbit, and it would have been unseemly in him to want to delay their chance—they who had been waiting for years as impatiently as he had. Besides, there were other, better opportunities in the making. A mission to Mars was already a year in the planning stage and, in several more, might become a reality: perhaps he would be selected as one of the astronauts to make that long but exciting journey. He could only hope that by then he would still be young enough that NASA wouldn’t hold his age against him.

In the meantime he was the commander on this mission of the United States’ newest orbiter, Promise. It was the latest iteration of the shuttles which had been discounted nearly forty years earlier. It was twice as large as those craft had been and, in addition to its larger cargo bay, also had individual cabins where the four-member crew could rest, sleep, and generally get a few hours of therapeutic isolation from crewmembers whom otherwise were in constant contact with. These cabins were only some eight feet long, six feet wide, and barely tall enough to stand up in, but they had a bed on which, or rather atop which, one might lie “horizontal,” and a reading lamp, a chair, and electrical outlets for one’s small personal electronics. Usually they were as quiet as the space without, though the bustling of crewmembers might now and then be heard as someone passed by in the short corridor outside, or went to the bathroom at the end of it and activated the vacuum elimination system, which made a low quick whooshing sound. Each compartment also had a small porthole eight inches in diameter near the head of the bed. One might look out of it, as Commander O’Malley was now doing. He had come here twenty minutes ago to rest for a while the green light of his intercom came on and Lieutenant Lawrence’s voice came on.

“Bill, you there?”

“What’s up?”

“I think you should come up front. We’ve come across something.”

—A most unexpected announcement. O’Malley’s first thought was that there might be some malfunction in the orbiter, then he thought that his lieutenant was referring to something outside of it, perhaps some space junk; either way a potentially dangerous situation. He left his little cabin and in zero gravity pushed himself along the corridor to the front of the orbiter where his crewmembers, Lawrence, the pilot, Bernhard, the payload specialist, and Paltz, the mission specialist, stood with their backs to him as they stood gathered at windows and looked out. O’Malley came up to them and said, “What’s up?”

Lawrence pointed out the window, off to the right. There, against the black backdrop of space, several hundred feet away, floated a rectangular object. Lawrence said he had noticed it when it had flashed some reflected sunlight. He never would have seen it otherwise, he added, because it was not picked up on radar, the green screen of which showed only a recurrent empty sweep. Then Lawrence said, under his breath:

“Houston we have a problem.” He looked about half-amused at his crewmembers and added, “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?”

“Only if it is a problem,” O’Malley answered, looking out the window. He considered that the trajectory of the orbiter was always planned in such a way as to avoid potentially dangerous space junk, though of course there was always the possibility that some untracked bit might come close to the craft or hit it. But this was quite different; this was very large. That it hadn’t showed up on the radar disturbed him.

“What do you think it is?” Paltz asked.

The commander shook his head; he didn’t know. But his sense of the thing—and the sense which they all felt, though they could not have said why—was that this object was the stranger because it wasn’t supposed to be there. He was about to say that it could be some unknown Russian or Chinese satellite but knew it couldn’t be: there was no kind of satellite which looked like that, so sleek, so apparently uniform in its barren surfaces.

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 they knew of. The Director had only to glance at her colleagues to see in their eyes that they we rethinking the same thing she was: that this thing was perhaps not of human origin. At the thought of this her heart leap into her throat a little, but outwardly she maintained her self-possession. Her first concern for the security of the astronauts. To the colleagues on either side of her she said in a subdued but authoritative voice:

“Nobody says a word about this. Understand? Put the feed through in my office, then take it off your screens.”

Once in her office 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 NASA 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 an oddly-made and very ruddy-cheeked adolescent, but he could—as May had once told a friend at a cocktail party—“build a spaceship out of tin cans and electron tubes.”

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 Promise on the monitor in her office. The rectangular object had drifted closer than ever to the spacecraft, two external cameras of which had been zoomed into it. This closer view revealed symbols on its surface. In the darkness, at that distance, they were not clear, but it was clear enough that they were not letters or numbers: they were circles—triangles—dots—dashes—curves. Mason and Franz stood beside the Director, all of them watching the monitor in silence for a full minute, before May said:

“Any idea what it is, gentlemen?”

“Is that ours?” Mason asked.

“It is not ours,” May said. “And it’s not Russian or Chinese.”

“It’s come from somewhere else, obviously,” Franz said. He looked to the Director as he said this, as though he were braving to say what, he knew, she was thinking.

“What do you mean, somewhere else?” Mason asked Franz. But in the next moment he had caught the engineer’s meaning, and looked at the Control Director uncomfortably before saying, almost as though he were trying to convince himself: “No.”

“Maybe not,” May said. “But it isn’t anything we’re familiar with. We know that much.”

“It is from somewhere else,” Franz asserted, more certainly than ever, as he looked at the monitor. He turned his eyes to the director and the governmental liaison. “If it’s from somewhere else, we’ve got to get it.”

“What are you talking about?” Mason asked.

Franz instead directed his words to May. “Do we know where the Tanxian is right now?” He was referring to the Chinese orbiter which was in space at the same time with Promise, and which was on a mission to repair one of its country’s satellites. Even at their closest the American and Chinese craft were never closer than hundreds of miles apart, but objects at that distance, in the crystal clear vacuum of space, were within clear visibility of the powerful lenses of spying cameras which both craft were outfitted with. The Director caught her engineer’s meaning. If that object was indeed something of alien origin then it was it was imperative that the Chinese not know about it. She got on the intercom with one of the flight coordinators in charge of tracking and asked him about the location of the Tanxian. He responded that it was on the other side of the earth but that it would come into view of the American craft in less than an hour.

Franz put up his hands in a gesture almost of surrender and said, “That’s it, then! We need to take it.”

“Take it?” Mason asked, blinking. “What are you talking about? 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 it’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 tone of voice even and confidently commonsensical.

“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 it’s something alien, and I say we take it.”

For one of the few times in her career the Director wasn’t sure what to do. Her gut instinct agreed with what the engineer had said, yet even now her first priority was for safety of the mission. No one knew what that thing was. Even on the unlikely chance that it was alien (and she was not absolutely convinced it was), she could not just give an order to retrieve something which might possibly harm the astronauts. She reminded him, “We don’t know what it is, Franz. It could be 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 extraordinary. May, this is the kind of thing we could only dream of! I mean, look at it,” he said, nodding to the monitor, to the object floating in space and more enticingly mysterious than ever. “We cannot afford to let this opportunity pass us by.”

“A retrieval is not part of this mission,” Mason said. And to May: “If it’s really alien, or if you think it is, the first thing you have to do is notify the Department of Defense.”

Franz clapped his hands together, hard, and bent over a little with a grimace as though he had been suddenly stricken with abdominal pain. He was grimacing as he said:

“No way! No way! We don’t have time for that. May, please, listen to me”—his worried eyes jumped back and forth between Mason to the Director—“If this has to go through the Department of Defense or anyone else then you can kiss this opportunity goodbye. We don’t have time to get the bureaucracy involved. Phone calls, consultations, meetings—forget it! We don’t have time. The Chinese are going to come up on the Promise in less than an hour. They’re going to see that thing as clearly as we do, and they are not going to waste more than five seconds before they go after it. Do you understand?” he asked Mason, this time in a voice almost pleading. “There’s only one question here: Do we get it, or do they?”

When the situation was put into that stark light, even Mason had to concede that his initial counsel might have been wrong. He was a “government official,” he was one of the “suits,” as the staff at Mission Control good-humoredly and not without a whiff of contempt referred him and his ilk, but it was precisely because of his position and purpose that he could not in good conscience advocate something which might give another country an advantage over his own. No one knew better than himself how long even a simple decision could take in the agencies he worked with. His mouth was tensely closed and he gave a few small shakes of his head before looking at the Director with an air of concession. “Alright,” he said. “You decide.”

It was not a decision she wanted to make. She was presented with a hundred unknowns and her job had always been to make sure there were as few unknowns as possible. She looked to her engineer and again saw in his eyes the urgent will to do as he had bidden. She envied him for not having to bear the brunt of responsibility for anything negative which might happen if she gave in to him. It occurred to her that the whole of the remainder of her career depended on her decision. Then she made up her mind. She coolly took a step to the intercom on her desk and spoke to the Communications Director.

“Patch me into the Promise on a secure line. Get me O’Malley.” In fifteen seconds he was on the line, and she said, “Jack, we think the object might be alien.” She waited for his response. When there was none, she asked, “Jack are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Jack, the Tanxian will be coming up on the horizon in less than an hour, and they’ll able to see it too. We think we should take it before they know what’s going on. But since we don’t know what it is, there may be some risk involved. I wanted to run that by you before we make the decision.”

Again there was a pause from the astronaut. O’Malley was glancing from one to another of his crew. That Mission Control had assumed the object was alien confirmed what they themselves had thought but had not yet admitted to one another. Now, as though confronted with the proven fact of the matter, they were all a little pale, a little breathless, and Palz and Bernhard had their mouths open, as though awaiting something momentous.

“Jack?” May asked.

“Yes. I’m here.”

“We don’t know what it is but we think we need to get it.”

“Then we’ll get it,” O’Malley said.

“Keep us apprised.”

“Yep.”

The communication was ended.

All the crewmembers looked to O’Malley in blank misgiving. Lawrence 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 to himself. They all agreed with the conclusion about the origin of the object, and despite any apprehensions they might have about retrieving it, they were also scientists and could not in good conscience abandon such a remarkable find.

Lawrence was the primary navigator and slowly, carefully, skillfully—with the lightest touches of the thruster controls—he directed Promise toward the object. The closer the crew came to it, the more distinct its characteristics became. They saw that its surface, which from a distance had seemed slick, was in fact textured with innumerable dimples or facets. The symbols which they had seen appeared only on one side of it, and these were not incised but extruded. Otherwise there were no parts or mechanisms visible on it. It was also larger than they had anticipated, being some twenty-five, perhaps thirty feet in length and ten wide. Big as it was, there would be no problem fitting it into the cargo bay, though there was the question of its weight, for if this was excessive it would be impossible for the orbiter to land safely and some other plan for getting it and the crew back to earth would have to be made.

In forty minutes the orbiter was just beneath it, then was rotated so as to be aligned lengthwise with it. In the cockpit the crew heard the whir of the electric motors as the bay doors were opened. Against the blackness of space they bloomed upward and outward like the graceful petals of some strange white flower.

From out of the cargo bay extended two robotic arms. Bernard maneuvered these 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 had just closed 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 spying. 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.

Unlike the cargo bays of the old shuttles, the one belonging to the Promise could be pressurized, the atmosphere within stabilized, so that astronauts could work in it without space suits. Among its many sensors was one for radiation, and it did not detect any emanating from the object, which the robotic arms continued to hold stationary and weightless a few feet above the floor. In the cockpit the crew looked at it on a monitor whose feed could be switched between two cameras, one from the front, one from the back, of the cargo bay.

“Jeeze,” Palz breathed.

He expressed the common wonder; no doubt too the common apprehensiveness. O’Malley said to his lieutenant:

“Alright. Get some air in there. I’ll go 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 a note of seriousness in this bit of humor.

He floated to the back of the large cockpit, then through passwageway leading to the private cabins; floated past the food storage area and into the area where the space suits and tools were stored; and then into another, smaller chamber where an astronaut, suited up for a spacewalk, checked on his gear before opening the next hatch and moving into the cargo bay or the vacuum of space. A digital gauge there measured the viability of the atmosphere in the cargo bay: the numbers ticked away, rising, till they reached one hundred percent. O’Malley opened the next hatch, passed through it, and, after he had closed it behind him, turned to face the object.

It was huge, heavy, strange, and as alien a thing as one could, or rather couldn’t, imagine. It had a dull reddish-brown color, like that of an old tarnished penny. He glided the fifteen feet which separated him from it and, closer, looking it over, trying to understand what it was and whether or not it was dangerous. After standing before it for several minutes he tentatively reached out to touch it. It felt like metal, or perhaps dense ceramic. He suspected that the object was immensely heavy and worried to think that the ship might not be able to land with such a load. Moving around it, to the other side, he came across the strange symbols which from a distance had been so uncertain and which, up close, were no less so. They were extruded pictographs made up of circles, triangles, and abrupt, straggling lines connecting them or running atop or under them. They made no sense to him. And then he noticed a faint line, a seam, running around the object about a third of the way down from the top.

In the cabin of the Promise the crew were watching O’Malley on the video feed monitor. Lawrence’s voice seemed to come out nowhere, though in fact it was coming from speakers of the intercoms of the cargo bay. “Jack, are you alright in there?”

O’Malley looked up to one of the surveillance cameras and responded with, “Yes, everything’s fine.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“Not one.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Some kind of metal, I think. It’s cool to the touch. It looks very heavy. It looks very old—”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he heard a faint whooshing sound as of air being expressed or sucked in. He saw that the seam near the top of the object had widened—that the top of it had popped up a little. His heart skipped a beat with fear. More sounds caught his attention: a series of clicks, as though something mechanical had been set in motion. The top plane of the object split into two lengthwise sections, which hinged upward at the walls so that they were vertical with them. They remained there a moment before slowly subsiding into the walls themselves, thus reveling what was was inside.

At first he thought it was some huge strange doll. It was very long and thin and dressed in what looked like a loose robe of shiny blue material, with some kind of insignia, consisting of two yellow interlocking hollow circles, on the left side of its chest. This robe or uniform rose into a high collar reaching up behind the head—which was not that of a human being. It was large and triangular, very wide at the top, where some brown fur or hair could be seen, and coming down to a pointed chin. Its large eyes were closed, showing only two fleshy slits beneath long lashes; above them black eyebrows stretched dramatically up and outward. The nose was very thin and pointed, and beneath it was a small, protruding, somehow swollen-looking mouth, reddish, fleshy, almost perfectly round. The skin was light gray-blue with small dark blue spots on the neck.

O’Malley’s every muscle had tensed; he was even holding his breath. He was frozen with terror, and the objective part of himself wondered at the fact that he was experiencing something which he had only read or heard about. But his terror rose higher when he saw the closed eyes of the creature open. They were huge, with pupils big as dimes and black as onyx, and surrounded by a sclera of blue or turquoise as pure in color as a gemstone. They stared upward at the cargo bay for a few seconds. A clear nictitating membrane blinked over them a few times. Then the creature moved its head, turning to the left and right—clearly uncertain where it was—then raised it slightly and noticed O’Malley, at whom it looked blankly.

“Jack, get out of there!”

—It was Lawrence’s voice coming through on the intercom. The creature turned its attention away from O’Malley and looked about as though to find the source of the human voice. Then it turned back to him, and, raising arms covered by the sleeves of its clothing, placed it hands on either side of its open container. The hands were overly large in comparison with the thin arms to which they were attached; more remarkably still, their five digits were extraordinarily long and tapered, and fluid in motion on account of the increased number of joints in each one. The creature began getting up, pulling its head forward and raising its torso.

“Jack, get out of there!”

Lawrence’s impulsive voice brought O’Malley to himself. All along he had felt his heart pounding wildly; his mind had been blank of everything but astonished fear. Perhaps he was not even thinking anymore but acting out of instinct. As fast as he could, by holding to objects on the wall of the bay, he pulled himself quickly to the forward cabin. In his hurry he fumbled with the wheel of the hatch and bumped his head a little on the top of the opening when he pulled himself inside, no sooner there than spinning around and closing the hatch behind him. Breathing fast and hard he hurried through the orbiter to the crew compartment where he found his crewmembers gathered around a monitor, watching the creature in the cargo bay. It was still in its enclosure, but sitting up now; open-eyed, merely turning its head in all directions, clearly confused as to its whereabouts. Then its round protruding mouth moved and it emitted a series of sounds, half warbling, half staccato: it was speaking.

If the human beings could have understood its language they would have learned that it was identifying itself, saying 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. Like a human being, it too had a heart and lungs, and its heart too was pounding with fear.

“We’ve got to get rid of thing,” Lawrence said, his voice hoarse with nervous impatience.

—O’Malley was inclined to agree, if only because it was the safest course of action. He saw that his lieutenant’s hands had reached for the controls which would open the bay doors to space. But a memory recurred 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 stars 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 like him, but who were, at that very moment, looking up into their skies and thinking the same thing he was. He said brusquely:

“Wait!”

“Wait for what?” Lawrence asked.

“We don’t know that it’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know that it’s not!”

—Rather than answer, O’Malley put out his hands against the back of the seat of his fellow astronaut and pushed himself away as he spun around to make his way back to the cargo bay. “Whatever you do, don’t open the bay doors! I’m going back.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m going back! If that thing attacks me and I can’t get back in time, or it tries to do anything to the ship, then you get rid of it—whether I’m in there or not. And that’s an order!”

And so he went back, thinking, as he did so, that he really must be out of his mind, for he was very frightened and full of the sense of danger. He thought of his wife and son and of how he was imperiling their future by putting himself in danger. But what was the alternative? The creature they had retrieved was alive and alien, and it was either dangerous or not, and there was only one way to find out. And didn’t this moment, this dangerous but great discovery, epitomize what the whole purpose of the space mission really was?—what his real reason for becoming an astronaut had been all along?—to explore, to make contact with other forms of life? He forcefully concentrated on these things in an effort to tamp down his own fear, telling himself, “No, you have to. That’s the point of it all. You have to.” He opened the hatch before the cargo bay, moved through it, and quickly closed it behind him, then turned to face the creature again. They looked at each other in silence.