Stories

(September 1954)

“And the top secret device the hot crew found in the middle of the Area 26 crater is this tiny thing? No radiation, no nothing? Pretty darn small. T-Mobile? Nokia? What's that mean?”

“About a quarter mile was frost-covered when it was found--midday in August, weather reporting 115° in the shade about an hour after we heard the bang in Mercury. Never saw anything like it.”

“These numbers on the front… some sort of code?”

“Those seem to be pushbuttons on the front there, but like nothing from any US maker. ‘T-Mobile’ drew a blank, ‘Nokia’ is a Finnish company, started out as a paper-maker, now they’re into rubber and cables. Don’t know what all it’s made out of, maybe plastic but it’s nothing any of the chemists recognize. And here’s the kicker – watch this rectangle here when I press this button. We thought it was a switch…”

“Wha... Dang. You got a movie of that? And that’s a neat tune. This some sort of kid’s toy?”

“It goes dark after a bit, but press this here and you get a ‘menu’…”

“Wait a sec. Little pictures? What’s this thing? Dick Tracy's wrist radio?”

“Don’t really know. We thought it was a tiny TV, but look at it. No raster lines, and you couldn't fit a sub-mini tube in it sideways, much less a color picture tube. Thought it might be glass slides, edge lit – but under a microscope it looks like little square dots that change color - not like the RCA color TV system. Now, press the rim around that button there, left, right, up, down…”

“The little pictures… move like when you pressed that power switch.”
“Yeah. It gets better. Look there - 'phonebook'.”

“This thing’s a telephone?”

"Could be, among other things. There's a list of about two dozen numbers that might be telephone numbers, but don't match with any area codes in use. Then 'Messaging' - there's about a hundred messages that come from some of the numbers, seem to mostly be confirmations of something."

"So it can transmit and receive messages?"

“'Text' messages, something called IM and email. It looks like it can also send 'video' messages, and voice messages.”

"This some sort of spy phone?"

"Maybe - but I don't think so. It is putting out a signal, around 900 megacycles, so maybe it can receive at that frequency also. But 900 mc? Nobody's doing anything on that frequency--doesn't have much range at all. Go right… and press… and there, the 'Gallery'. Photos. Press the center button…”

“We couldn't make a transceiver this small for that frequency range. Pictures. People? A truck? Kind of small--hard to make out the details, but… that's the peaks off to the north, all right. Is that a Chevy? What's that big building, looks like a concrete bunker?”

“We can't make a lot of what's in that thing. The hood ornament does look like the brand, but the style... We showed an enlargement to some folks we know in town, it’s not next year’s model. There's nothing like that building anywhere out here, even Yucca or Jackass Flats where we've been exploding the big ones. And the pictures seem to have dates and times associated with them – but the date’s pretty fantastic. Lots of them are test patterns like you’d see on TV. Go to the next one.”

“A girl? Look at that filly – and how she’s, um… Good lord… what IS this thing?”

“Don’t leave much to the imagination, does it? And in full color… Ah, well, uh... What is it? We don't know. One of the boys in Analysis joked it might have a computer in it, but that's... maybe not as far-fetched as it might seem. This ‘phone’ does a lot of other things, you'd need a truckload of equipment to do a tenth of it. And it’s all pretty intuitive – someone put a lot of thought into how it all worked. The buttons, this ‘menu’ thing. You go through the menus, and there’s a lot you can do, down to cropping and altering the pictures."

"And no cord. No heat."

"No, just one battery. The back slides off… and look at the size of that battery. We don’t know what a ‘Li-ion’ battery is – maybe a ni-cad variant, it puts out 3.7 volts so each cell’s maybe 1.2, 1.3 volts. That’s about that range. We figured out how to recharge it, by the way.”

“Smallest ni-cad I’ve seen’s about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Three cells in that?”

“Maybe. Chemists say it's possible to make a battery out of lithium, but there's too many other metals easier to work with. Eighth of an inch thick, and we can’t make anything like it. Look at the label – made in Korea, finished in China. Neither country can make much more than cheap stamped-tin toys, much less anything that looks like this. Six languages on the label, all saying the same thing, ‘refer to the manual’, all the menus use English words, but in a menu called 'Settings' you can choose between English, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic."

"German?"

"Yeah. But it's all just translated English. Same stuff in each language, and the few messages that weren't just 'OK' were in English. Badly spelled, but English - though we don't know what 'LOL' means."

"Okay... So the Germans didn't do this - maybe the Swiss?"

"Mmmm, no. Let me pull the battery out - see how tight it fits? Now, inside this compartment - look at the machining, the tolerances. We’ve got the best machinists in the world here, and they’d be hard pressed to put out something finished and clean like this. Plastic, metal, that MIGHT be a circuit board under there, but we haven’t tried to disassemble it. There’s a couple of screws, tiny Phillips, but we haven’t tried removing them yet. X-rays don't show much. Everything’s so small - And it’s got a serial number - this isn’t a one-off piece of work.”

“Doesn’t look like it… Made in Mexico? I don't think so. Those numbers there – 2012.06.15… It's nuts, but could that be a manufacturing date?”

“It’s not quite so crazy as it seems. This thing's got a calendar – according to it, today’s August 19th. 2013 at 3:23 AM. The clock seems pretty accurate, too, measuring against WWV we've lost about a second over the last month - but there's no mechanical movement or sound and the smallest quartz crystal clock made is about the size of your desk. But it could be a date, maybe. If you think it came from the future.”

“Well, it sure as hell didn’t come from Finland, Mexico or China!”

“So the next step… this going to get classified and buried?”

“It could… it’s irreplaceable, after all – but if it comes from the future we could learn a lot from it. Materials, electronics… wait… Organizer... calculator? It's a calculator also?”

“Yeah. Accurate to 16 digits like that, or you can go into 'scientific' mode where it uses exponents and makes my 20 inch slide rule look like firewood. There's other things too - a stopwatch, alarm clock, we don’t know what a GPS Navigator is – says it can’t synch, but it’s ‘java powered’. Don’t think we’re talking coffee here."

"No, I guess not."

"There's a camera, and it does pictures and movies, or 'video' - that little dot on the back seems to be the lens. You know how much equipment is needed for a TV transmission--we've had a few out here over the years, yet this thing can both take and store color video. And that’s not even thought of by the networks… There's also some games on it, and some music… or what's labeled music. If it's from the future, apparently not everything's gotten better. This hole here seems to be an audio jack - we rigged up an adapter and it's putting out stereo."

"Stereo? The smallest stereo system I ... How did the music sound when you hooked it up to an amp?"

"Loud, clear - no hiss, warble or popping. Cleanest audio signal I’ve ever had on a scope. It still sounded terrible, but it was a clean terrible. This can't have been cheap - it's got too many things in it.”

“Not cheap, no. It looks like a jeweler worked it over, and a whole lot of people must have worked on the development. And all in secrecy that makes the Manhattan Project look like a sieve."

"You'd think so. There's not a whisper of anything like this anywhere in the world. Even the steps to make the individual things small enough to fit in that case are beyond us. A telephone, transceiver, calculator, stereo, clock, camera and a photo lab, video or movie camera, some sort of wire or tape recorder to store all the music and the video signals…”

“It’s like a puzzle box. Figure out one thing, and the rest might fall into place--but what’s the one thing?”

“Beats me, but we could learn a hell of a lot. It could change darn near everything, if we can figure it out. The battery tech alone would be worth millions. We should contact Bell Labs, MIT, CalTech, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M to start with. This could be worth millions – maybe even billions.”

“That’s a big if. But if it's from the future, then it’s only 60 years ahead--things can’t change THAT much… can they? If China and Finland and Mexico can make stuff like this – what’s the US going to be doing?”

"Something amazing - I'm sure of it."

(July 2013)

The wreckage was impressive, even for the Nevada Test Site, an area used to devastating explosions of all kinds. The 50-year old reinforced disassembly hot cell for Project Pluto (long since cooled to the point it could be used for other high-energy events) had been silently splattered across several hundred square yards in lentil-sized chunks. A hundred megawatts into a theoretical ‘time displacement’ device should have pushed a cell phone two days into the future, but proved an excellent (if costly) way to quietly recycle concrete into fine road aggregate. (At most, it should have done little more than scorch the inside of the 8 foot thick building, maybe blow the thick steel doors off. But they were reduced to tiny chunks also.)

The researchers got good data (if expensive); the NTS management got an obsolete building removed for free and a whole lot of paving material. It was a win for both.

After two months, with no indication of the cell phone popping back in, the cameras and field monitors were packed up and the project put on hold while the theory was re-examined. The phone never did show, but since it was a Wal-Mart $10 special nobody worried about it much.

After all, it was disposable.

Imagine a race, recently learning how to be amphibious. Eyes work well in water, not so well in air. Imagine hands like frog digits, a need to stay moist - if not wet. Can be warm blooded, or not - but heat doesn't affect them much (but dehydration does.) There's two kinds of 'air' for them, thick (water) and thin (gas).

Imagine trying to create a technological civilization, when you can't see clearly. What's the first thing you'd develop?

Goggles - to keep the water in. Maybe w/water bladders, so the water could be changed occasionally.

I don't see their offices in the thin having carpet...

The message had been surprisingly unambiguous, considering it came from an alien culture. Of course, they HAD had the 'Voyager' plaque to use as a standard, but what are you supposed to do when the first message you get from outer space resembles graphical IKEA assembly instructions designed to transcend spoken or written languages?

You do what they ask. A 'space station' put into orbit that resembled two shipping containers butted together, with a clear partition in the middle, with two small airlock pass-throughs installed. No life support on one side, whatever you wanted on the other. (And the graphic sequence for THAT one was a doozy.) Whatever you needed for docking on your side, leave the other one plain.

It was built, and launched – on time and amazingly under budget.

The thing was in orbit two weeks when an alien ship dropped in around Mars with a terrific flash, then zipped into place next to the Contact Station at a rate that left the astronomers tracking it dizzy. There was a flurry of EVA activity, and the alien craft grafted itself onto the bare end and the alien half filled with air slightly lower in pressure and higher in oxygen - a very good sign.

Cameras showed three very hairy starfish going in and out. The Russians launched the waiting Soyuz-V with an international delegation, docking with the Contact Station in short order.
And the hatch opened. The play started, all parts pre-scripted.

On the other side of the partition, two starfish were in isolation suits. The third shaved off some of its ‘hair’, put it in a vented container, then put it in one of the airlock chambers. On the human side, a volunteer unsuited, shaved a patch of scalp, stuffed, and stuck the container in the other. Both chambers bled down to hard vacuum for several minutes so atmospheres wouldn't mix. Then the starfish unsealed the human's airlock, and pulled out the container while the human did the same to the alien's airlock.

The alien lifted the container slowly, pivoted to the other two, then opened the container to what appeared to be a breathing orifice and sniffed deeply, paused for a moment…

Continue reading "First Contact" »

The view from the 86th floor was, as always, spectacular. From the east, the sun rising over the Atlantic, nothing could compare. Off in other directions the city stretched away, rousing from the sluggish night to an active day. He watched the transition as the darkness melted away, pondering the next move.

Retirement, perhaps? Certainly there was justification. There used to be plenty of work, seemed like every week there was some insane inventor with a megalomaniacal streak creating something that’d be perfectly at home on the cover of a ‘30’s science fiction magazine. Death rays, mind control rays, ‘infernal devices’ of a thousand types and twice as many ways to use them to take over the world. There was that one nutcase who created a ‘life extension ray’ – though what use THAT would be in conquering a city he never quite understood. They’d all gotten a good laugh out of that one – it felt like you were dropped into a vat of feathers, tickling like mad over every inch of your body, inside and out. It was very strange indeed to have your appendix force you to laugh… The madman was quite upset when the team surrounded him, chuckling as he did his worst.

Later on, he understood, the guy became a cartoonist – created a very popular series about a roadrunner and a wolf or something, and inventions that were always blowing up. He shook his head - that was what 60 - 75 years ago? Well, side effects were to be expected in this line of work. Sure couldn’t fault the guy’s work – he was only now able to spot the occasional gray hair.

Things dropped off quickly, though, after the War. There was the occasional mad scientist to deal with, but the spark of creative insanity just seemed to be absent completely in the mainland. Overseas was another matter – volcanoes and piranha pits were so much cheaper in South America and Africa that sometimes it seemed a marvel that there weren’t entire subdivisions of mad inventors springing up.

Rom had theorized it had to do with short-wave radiation – she’d graphed the incidents of mad genius against the commercialization of the higher frequencies, and the higher the wavelength the lower the creative madness rate. When they’d parked satellites in geostationary orbit and started broadcasting commercially, the bottom fell out of the curve completely. Theory proven, as far as could be determined. And truth be told, as the cities and population grew it really was something of a relief to not have to worry about someone with a disintegration ray deciding to raze a skyline they didn’t like.

The years had passed fairly quickly after that, pretty much uneventfully. Lots of research time, and it was always amusing to see what folks would do with the released ideas. The IPod, for example, and that thing called the internet. The right idea in the right ear at the right time… you could do a lot if you knew just where to give a gentle nudge.

At least, on the level of the sciences it was possible. Politics, both international and domestic, were stubbornly resistant to ‘gentle’ nudging. If it wasn’t for the landmarks, there were more than a few times he’d been tempted to unleash some of the more destructive things in storage on Washington and Moscow. (And wouldn’t THAT have caused problems! No, better they stay in storage.)
No, it took a bit more sometimes. The almost-war in ’77 – he’d actually needed to jam communications networks in the USSR to keep a crazy colonel from a missile launch. And when the generals tried to lock down the Russian Parliament – all it took was a few calls to the right number and the phones were turned off.

9/11 was a shocker – there’d been no advance warning on that one. The team had gone do to what they could when the planes hit, he’d hung back to get that grav-beam invented in ’33 going. The vacuum tubes were in bad shape – there were spares, but it took him a while to swap them out and get it up and running and aimed properly to keep the Towers from falling. Millions of tons of steel and concrete, held from collapse long enough to get thousands of people out - then some of the ancient, gassy spare tubes blew. The first tower collapsed while he was swapping the originals back – and they lasted a bare half-hour. He watched helplessly as the second tower dropped.

He hadn’t had the heart after that to try to reconstitute the team. There wasn’t really much point – he’d bootstrapped enough medical and physical innovations that the ball was rolling well without his help. Politically? Not so much… he’d outlived most of his contacts around the world, and after the first seven assassination attempts when personally trying to get the influence back, it was apparent that the ways that worked to build trust fifty years back weren’t going to be sufficient after the turn of the century.

So he wrote, and researched, and observed. The internet made the last a lot easier and communicating quickly. An email to the right person at the right time tended to be almost as effective as a face-to-face, but figuring out who was the right person could be … iffy.

So what was next? Retirement?