Logie Harris, unlike many of his more calvinistic compatriots, enjoyed a good brandy. If the Lord was happy to turn water into wine, he wasn’t about to thwart His purpose by refusing it. There was, he had now been persuaded, a message directed at us from something out there. But that fact had to be weighed against another message, the clear statement that we and we alone were the children of God. That being so, the message was coming from some alien creature which had no more right to salvation than Seth’s Labrador, now under the table and sniffing at his shoes. The signallers — divorced from God’s salvation — could only have malevolent intent. Their earthly spokeswoman in the form of Hazel Baxendale was right here, advising the President. I sense great danger, thought Logie, and pray that God will help me steer the President on the true path. We must have nothing to do with these entities.
Al Sullivan pondered. An issue like this needed a huge input of expertise, the wisest heads going. But there were no specialist advisers, there was no NSC meeting, no Chief of Staff, nobody outside this room. The Chief clearly saw this as a matter for the most extraordinary security. He wondered how Il Presidente was going to play this one. The man had some tough choices to make in a matter of hours, especially with those people running loose in Europe. He’s surprised a lot of us, Sullivan mused. He’s turned out to be quiet, stoical, dignified even, and to have an open and reflective mind. I also know him as one tough-minded and obstinate SOB. Once he knows the right course of action, he’ll pursue it relentlessly. The question is, what is the right course of action?
The CIA Director took a cigar from the proffered box. The President nodded at the table. Stewards quickly cleared it, piled logs on the fire. There was a flurry of cold air as they left.
Sullivan puffed at the fine Macanudo. ‘The situation has changed, Mr President.’
‘Uhuh?’ Bull gave an encouraging nod.
‘When the Russians and British had a monopoly on the disk, we stood to fade out.’
Bull nodded again. ‘I can see that. We’d have been excluded from the game.’
Sullivan said, ‘But now we have this Petrie guy, and the disk. Now we can access the message.’
‘Assuming we can persuade him to hand over the encryption keys, which are safely in his head.’
‘That’s not a problem,’ the CIA Chief said confidently.
‘Mr Sullivan, that has a sinister sound to it.’ Hazel said it light-heartedly. She had settled for a cranberry juice and, in contrast to the men around the table, was sitting upright and tense.
Sullivan said, ‘Relax, Ms Baxendale, we’re not talking medieval torture.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’
The DCI grinned. ‘Not exactly.’
The President too was lighting a large cigar. ‘I don’t want to know, Al.’
Sullivan blew a flawed smoke ring. ‘There could be overwhelming military advantages tucked away in these disks, even if they only let us jump fifty years ahead.’
Hazel nodded her agreement. ‘Petrie’s interrogation mentioned new force fields at energies beyond anything we understand now. They won’t make practical weapons, not for a long time, but we have to keep a weather eye on anything that increases our understanding of subnuclear matter.’
‘I’d go along with that,’ the President said.
‘So. Bring them over, let’s analyse the material. You saw what was on the sample disk. It’s just fantastic.’
Bull said, ‘But the British and the Russians had their chance and turned it down.’
Logie Harris said, ‘I praise God that they did, and trust our President to do the same.’
Hazel said, ‘Their mistake is our profit.’
‘These are not God’s creatures, Ms Baxendale. They can only be motivated by malice.’
‘Rubbish. There are strong selective advantages to the old-fashioned ethic of helping your neighbour.’ Hazel turned to Bull, who was watching the exchange with careful eyes. ‘Sir, you heard Petrie’s interrogation this morning. Well, I took advice on the issue.’
‘I know you did.’
‘The opinion concurs with Petrie. If advanced civilisations hadn’t evolved a code for living with their neighbours they’d have self-destructed long ago. The message is on the level. We’d be fools to turn our back on them.’
Harris said, ‘Your argument is as false as the message because you base it on the idea of evolution.’
‘Here we go, still stuck in the nineteenth century.’
‘In the twenty-first, I assure you. Evolution is a story, no more. It fails to explain the irreducible complexity of even a single cell. Tiny evolutionary steps cannot have created it. From molecules to a living cell is a fantastic jump which no evolutionists have explained.’
‘Hey, you’ve been reading up on this, Logie.’
‘Indeed, Ms Baxendale. And what I also read is that the evolutionists believe mind was created from inert matter by mindless forces. They believe that all the complexity and structure of the world generated itself. They even believe that the Universe created itself out of nothing, a miraculous feat indeed.’ Harris turned to the President. ‘Your Science Adviser called me a backwoodsman, Seth, blinded by faith. But the evolutionists have their own faith, that of materialism. They will die rather than admit to design even when the evidence of design is staring them in the face.’
Hazel said, ‘The fossil record speaks for itself. Life has evolved. And the genetic code backs this up. There’s a ninety-nine per cent overlap between the genes of chimps and humans. How can that be if we aren’t closely related?’
‘You mean you’d let your daughter marry a chimpanzee?’
Bull grinned, and Hazel said, ‘Oh Christ.’
Sullivan said, ‘Mr President, perhaps I can bring some clarity to the situation here.’
‘Al, please do.’
‘We can remove this Petrie and destroy the disk. That way everything stays the way it was before.’
The President’s cigar was well alight and he looked at the glowing end with satisfaction. ‘We could just hand him over to the Slovak authorities. Let them, or the Russians or the Brits, do the throat-cutting. Our hands would stay clean.’
Hazel bit her tongue.
Sullivan sipped at an Armenian cognac. ‘Too risky. We’d have no control over the situation. We’d have to do the job ourselves.’
Good old reliable Al.
The DCI continued: ‘Or we could get hold of the disk and the encryption keys in his head. Make use of the knowledge already in the disks but just don’t reply to the signallers, so avoiding the danger inherent in a reply. We could control the flow of the new knowledge, feed it through our institutes, make it look like a wonderful new renaissance of science or something.’
‘Maybe we should be taking that route,’ the President wondered. ‘Now that this guy has walked through our door.’
Hazel said, ‘That’s unrealistic. Science doesn’t work that way. Hundreds of people would have to be told the truth. Hundreds or thousands of others would guess it. If just one individual susses out there’s an extraterrestrial signal, we don’t know what would follow.’
The DCI grinned again. ‘Disinformation is my trade, Hazel. Don’t underestimate the power of a good cover story.’ Hazel shook her head sceptically and her earrings swung like little pendulums.