Whilst most of the events and characters in this story are based on fact and research, some are not, being as they are fabrications completely at the discretion of the author: It is entirely up to the reader what they choose to believe or discredit.
General Ulysses R. Bauer Roebuckle III inched into the air above his bed, his 25-stone-body evenly held so that it balanced perfectly – something it hadn’t done since parachuting during basic training in 1944. A blue light edged its way up and down his body; it felt warm and stimulated his corpulent loins. He definitely hadn’t felt like this since, maybe, 1945 when he was stationed in Hawaii and the girls had all admired his, then, perfect chin and the rakish angle of his cap. As the light moved up and down his body and eased inside of him the general discovered he was becoming aroused. He looked down to see his pyjama bottoms parted at the groin and a tumescent erection springing forth from between the fly. It was magnificent and entirely worthy of his five stars. The light began to play solely upon his penis and the heat generated by the two – penis and light - made his testes sweat. He had never felt such joy, such peaceful sexual enjoyment, not even in panama, 1946, where the girls could control the muscles in their vaginas so it felt like you were inside Christmas.
The light was neither male nor female, only inside of him. The General arched his back high into the air as he climaxed into the blue light. He felt the blue light reach deep into his hips and pull out all of him; he bucked and let out a squeak. His ejaculate hung upon the stars.
“Ullie! What in God’s name are you doing?” His wife, Dora, said.
“Ugh,” the General said.
“Ullie, you are on the floor thrusting like a drunk mule on a Mexican.”
What could he tell her?
An alien just sexualised me.
A blue light has just raped me.
Honey, the aliens is sexual deviants comin’ to hump us all.
“I was dreaming, honey.”
“You certainly were. Ulysses R. Bauer Roebuckle III, one day you is goin’ to injure yo’ self. Goodnight.”
Dora didn’t look at him but he had seen her glance at his crotch before she turned out the light. He rubbed his head, groaned, said fuck twenty times inside his head.
“It jus’ happened, Dora. I don’t know why.”
“Go to sleep, Ulysses.”
As the General cleaned him self up in the bathroom he went over the incident again. He scrubbed at his crotch trying to clean all the residues of himself and the blue light. He scrubbed for half an hour, but his testicles still had a blue tint to them. They reminded him of an old out of focus photograph he had seen of Pluto. He did feel overwhelmed, tired. His work was becoming increasingly oppressive.
The General was working on the Voyager 2 project at N.A.S.A organising a critical part of the launch. His team were to liaise with Carl Sagan at Cornell University over which items were to be placed inside the craft. In the Generals office it was known as ‘the time capsule’, as it was generally acknowledged that the “Dam thing is too small to be found by any body, man or astro-man, in all that stupid space.” N.A.S.A wanted a capsule of items that would best express the human race in 1977. So they created a beautiful golden record, which sent the press into ecstasies of hyperbolae, that they imagined being the sum of all human endeavours.
The General called it ‘the hippy-disk.’
The General, who was chosen for his pragmatism, and his team liaised with Sagan to get the contents of the time capsule right. This was nothing like the Pioneer plaque of the early seventies, with its line drawings of a man and woman and its basic stellar map. The Golden Record had sounds as well as sights. It had not only maps, colour spectrums, properties of the planets, mathematical and physical unit definitions but also: a spoken greeting in 55 languages; recorded messages from Jimmy Carter, President of The United States of America, and Kurt Waldheim, the UN Secretary-General; music; birdsong and other sounds from nature, including the sounds of the sea and also the whales within it. Sagan had asked for and got, a pygmy girl’s initiation song from Zaire. The General had demanded and got, ‘Johnny B. Goode’ by Chuck Berry. The General was proud of his choice as he felt that it stood out amongst all the bagpipes from Azerbaijan and the panpipes from the Solomon Islands; felt it put America on the map, golden record wise. Sagan and the General were at this minute locked in intense back and forth discussion over an Indonesian flower song. The General was lobbying for the inclusion of ‘Good Ol’ Rebel Soldier’ and was getting no reply from Sagan.
The General called Sagan, “That bongo playing freaknic.”
Sagan called the General, “N.A.S.A’s space ape; that sweaty astro-pig.”
“That woolly headed idiot wants to put the sound of the wind in the capsule. The wind! The sound of nothing brushing past nothing,” The General said to his assistants, banging his fist onto his desk, making the small figurine of General Lee jump an inch into the air.
He had read the Project Blue Book report on alien sightings; he didn’t believe any of it, but he thought he and his team had best try to follow the orders, try to send a message to the universe. He called the people who saw ‘aliens hooch-drinking hicks.’ They were throwbacks to his childhood in Alabama; walking, drinking reminders of his wrench out of the swamp of the South and his climb into the army, up the ranks and to this point now: arguing with a hippy over Peruvian wedding songs.
But the blue light, this was something else. Was it a dream? The General gazed into the bathroom mirror deep in thought.
It must be dream. I have had those kinds of dreams before, the arousing kind, but back when I was a kid, a spotty Southern youth eating his food with his hands. I haven’t got hot under the collar for years. Something is wrong here. Maybe my status, I was chosen… No! Jesus… Sorry. Get it together Ulysses.
On the drive to Cape Canaveral the General tried to forget his dream of the night before. It was hard to do. At a large junction Ulysses saw a large brown dog mating with a small white one. Both the dogs were staring intently at him through his open window, tongues lolling. He wound the window tight to the top and turned the radio up. It was just in time; a prostitute was banging on his window shouting at him, extorting him to invite her into the car to enjoy the good time that they would inevitably have if only he would allow her to get into the car and show him. She looked drunk, even at this early hour and, the General thought, her lipstick was definitely the wrong tone for her skin colour, like a bruise on a mouldy peach. The General almost went through a red light in his haste to escape from the ugly apparition.
When the General arrived at his sections meeting room the table was already covered with empty paper coffee cups and over flowing ashtrays. The two scientists, Randal and Peterskienson, were at the drawing board, pens out annotating some drawings. He valued their opinion on scientific matters ever since they had the idea of adding a pure sample of Uranium-238 into the capsule, therefore allowing the aliens to work out the age of the contents by configuring the half—life of the isotope, but in other cultural matters, the General considered himself to be the only one on the team with the brains and the style to make the decisions. On the board in front of the two scientists were pictures of a hot-rod car, John Wayne and a firework exploding. Randal had drawn a cowboy hat onto the picture of John Wayne and Peterskienson appeared to be arguing for its exclusion.
“Randal, listen, they do not need to know about his film career that directly. If you want we could add a reel to the capsule, but I think it is stereotyping him as just a cowpoke.”
“Peterskienson: he is a cowpoke.”
“He is a god dam icon, ladies. Now put that hat back on him, thank you very much.” The general said as he poured himself a coffee and sat down at his desk. “When will you learn, Peterskienson, we are representing this fine planet to potential extra terrestrials; they need to know what we are about and how we do things down here. Now, ladies, what is the greatest accomplishment ever made by man?”
“The conquest of the west,” Randal and Peterskienson both said at the same time with the jaded tone of those forced into repetition. Although, the General thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he heard Peterskienson say ‘space’ instead of ‘west’.
“Exactly. And who is the greatest exponent of that manifest destiny?”
“John Wayne,” they both intoned.
“Okay, so put a god dam Stetson on him. What other ideas have you two eggheads had? What does that Rolling Stone Sagan want in the capsule today? A God dam tepee and drum set, I expect”
“This,” Randal said as he turned over the sheet to reveal the picture underneath. It showed two nude people, a man; hairy, well endowed and shaggy haired, and a woman; pregnant, slightly rotund, looking directly into the camera, without any shame. The General was aghast, his mouth hanging like a just vacated hammock.
“General?” Randal was bowing down to the General’s eye level.
“It’s a picture of the natural state of two humans in…”
“Shut up!” The General cut Peterskienson off.
“May God have mercy on us.” The General was imagining waves of blue light coming towards the earth, imagining a fleet of aliens expecting to make love to a planet of naked hairy humans. What Sagan was proposing was frightening; setting us up for intergalactic rape. There would be no hope; we would have no chance against the blue light. The army would have no chance against such sexual weaponry. It would suck dry the loins of every man, women – and God protect us – child. Sagan and those Cornell beatniks had to be stopped.
In a small office on the campus of Cornell University Carl Sagan was arguing on the phone with a colleague.
“Frank, listen. This is not really a hello to the aliens. The Puerto Rico message will take twenty-five thousand years to get there. Its just us scientists showing off. We have to find something to justify your formula empirically, or its just meaningless numbers. We are working in the realms of conjecture, but we must, and will, convert that fuzziness into science with results.” Sagan moved the phone from his right ear to his left and nodded in agreement with something the caller was saying.
“Frank, in all due respect, this Golden Record is going to be more important than the Puerto Rico message. Have you been back to Arecibo lately? Really? Oh… Okay, will keep trying. I suppose that if a civilisation has the potential to communicate across space it could have the potential to destroy itself and… Yes, exactly, Frank. It interferes with the equation, but so does Zaitsev and all the others. Let them add to it, work on it, it adds to the discussion. You agree we need anything at this point to stimulate the scientific community on this subject? Well then. I’ll speak to you soon. Bye, Frank.” Sagan hung up the phone began to write on a piece of paper in front of him.
N = N* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x fl.
N = 10 × 0.5 × 2 × 1 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10,000 = 10.
“Frank, I love you, you idiot. Ten star faring civilisations,” Sagan said to himself. The equations represented Frank Drakes’ formula for predicting the amount of developed civilisations in our galaxy. Drake had come to the beautiful round figure of ten.
Then underneath these numbers he wrote:
The Great Silence.
Then underneath that:
The Great Filter.
Sagan turned to the young student who was typing a manuscript for him in a corner of the room.
“Paul. What do you think of Fermi and Hart’s paradox?”
“Well, if your…”
“Not mine, that’s Drake’s equation.”
“… Sorry, Drake’s equation tells us that there are x amount of civilizations in our galaxy, surely we must, with all of the probes, radio messages, have contacted something by now. Why has there been no reply?”
“What if they do not want to contact us?”
“That’s a little rude,” Paul said.
“Don’t be facetious, Paul. Think about it. There are many issues here; scale, the messages have not yet reached them; technology, maybe our tech cannot be read by their tech; Maybe they are already here, or, most terrifying of all: we are alone.”
“Do you really think it is inevitable that all civilisations will destroy themselves? I find that part of it a little depressing.” Paul asked.
“I don’t know, Paul. You are right, though. It is a bleak viewpoint. A little faith is needed, though. When you start looking into what the Great Filter does your faith is really tested. The Great Filter puts planets through such a rigorous test. A planet has to be in the correct orbit, not to close to the sun or water will not be present, not to far away or the water will only be ice. Planet Earth, luckily for us, is the correct size so that the ultraviolet radiation it emits does not kill the life upon it; our moon also protects us from radiation. In fact it is the moon that could have been so critical to life on Earth. A large moon, an unusual occurrence in our solar system, is responsible for our significant tidal system, which creates tidal pools, crucibles for the development of life. The moon is thought to be the result of the impact of a Mars-size object and that this impact gave the earth its tilt, and therefore its seasonal weather, vital for complex life. It also gave us our plate tectonics, without which we would have no oceanic crust. But it is a bleak outlook. I believe in intelligent life in our galaxy, I just feel it in my heart.”
“Like some people feel God, Dr. Sagan.”
“Don’t be a smart ass, Paul. I am a scientist, not a priest.”
Unknown to Carl Sagan, but at that exact moment, in another small office, General Ulysses R. Bauer Roebuckle was summoning up the courage to make a phone call. The General clapped his hands together and screwed up his fists, picked up the phone and put it down again. He could not bear to speak to Sagan about even the most benign of subjects, and now, after the naked picture, he would have to become embroiled in a discussion with the “dammed East Coast intellectual,” as he had called him when requesting Sagan’s number on a piece of paper that he would instantly screw up in anger as soon as the conversation ended. He dialed the last number finally; he had kept putting the phone down before it registered, like a teenager nervously calling a date. The nine, the number the General always associated with Sagan triggered the call.
“Hello, Sagan here.” Sagan’s voice sounded distant and distracted.
“Hello. This is General R. Bauer…”
“Yes, General, I know who you are. You don’t have to repeat that protracted name every time you call. It’s interminable. What can I do for you?”
“Now listen hear, Sagan, I am a five-star general. I demand and expect respect from you poindexters out east.”
“Yes, yes, Herr general. I am all ears, or fire away, as you would probably prefer it.”
“Nudity.”
“Sorry?”
“You will be, Sagan.”
“Clarify your self, general.”
“I have seen the pictures you want to put on the Golden Record.”
“Ah, are they not perfect examples of the human body.”
“They are smut,” the general said.
“What is your problem with them, general?”
“They…” They are star-porn? The general could not say that to Sagan, he would never live it down. “I…” I have seen the blue light… The general could not tell Sagan about the blue light, either. Sagan would relish a story like that.
“Yes, general. Stop stuttering. What is your problem with the pictures?”
“They remind me of my mother.”
“What?”
“No… Wait. Their eyes bore into your soul. They will scare the E.T.’s. Like eye weapons.”
“General, please, I am trying to do three jobs here; teach, research and work with you – which feels like four jobs in one – so could you please try to phone me with serious issues, or not at all. Oh, and before I go: the Indonesian flower song is in; that idiotic rebel song is out. Goodbye general.” The phone line clicked dead.
The general held the phone in his hand mouthing the words eye weapons while his own eyes unfocused and his office clouded over.
“General, was that Sagan on the phone?” Randal came into the room holding a film reel, stood in front of the generals desk and said, “Did you ask him about John Wayne’s Stetson?”
That night the general had another dream. This time the blue light was everywhere; the entire world was bathed in it. People were lying in the streets ejaculating into banks of blue luminosity. Airplanes fell out of the sky; ships crashed into harbours; the stock exchange dissolved into sexual anarchy; roads became heaps of automobiles and people rolling in lust and pain as more cars crashed into the pile-ups. The soldiers guarding the rocket defense sights left their posts completely unprotected as they took off their helmets and lay down before the blue light, allowing the slow invasion of the planet to take place. In the blue centre of the aliens sat Carl Sagan laughing and pointing at the spent, prostrate figures that covered the planets surface. Then the general awoke, sweating and screaming.
At seventy miles an hour the general found it increasingly hard to load his shotgun and change the gears of his Government Issue olive drab car. He had waved his driver away with a flick of his handgun four hours ago and was now hitting the outskirts of Ithaca. The general folded opened his map and laid it across the steering wheel, obscuring his instrument gauges, trying to find Cornell University. The car veered across the highway until it hit a curb, triggering the shotgun and blowing a jagged hole through the roof. All the gas receipts the driver had tucked away under the sun visor flew into the air in an explosion of tiny pieces of white paper giving the car the appearance of having a blowhole. The general imagined himself inside a black whale swimming toward Sagan and fired off another expulsion from his metal nostril. It was becoming increasingly difficult to press the pedals in the car as the detritus of the journey had collected under the general’s feet. He had to stamp hard on the brake to crush an empty Dr. Pepper’s can that was stuck underneath the pedal, stopping him abruptly in the middle of a busy crossroads. The general greeted the car horns and shouts of other drivers with a blast from his shotgun-blowhole and, after taking the wrong direction then making a tremendously slow three-point turn to rectify the wrong turn, headed toward Cornell University. In the general’s mind Sagan’s face merged with the pictures of the naked couple from the Golden Record so that Sagan grinned unpleasantly from both heads; coquettishly from the woman’s, aggressively from the man’s, both challenging him.
The general had left Florida in a hurry, leaving his hat and tie behind on his desk, his I.D. badge beside the telephone, only stopping to unlock the gun chest and empty it into a hold all. It didn’t matter to the general, his hatless state, as he had stopped wearing it anyway, finding it kept the panic rolling around inside his head. The general had decided that for the safety of the world Sagan must be stopped and that he, General Ulysses R. Bauer Roebuckle III, was the man to do it. His two scientist assistants had not understood his explanation that Sagan was responsible for the sexual genocide of the human race and had suggested that he lie down for a bit until his face was less red and actually you have been working hard on the project and my God yes you do look a little tired, and privately commenting on the miraculous ability of his eyes to point riotously in different directions. He told them to leave his office, but bring him some bourbon and coffee to calm his nerves. They only returned with some water so he went to get some whiskey himself, and then decided to go to see Sagan personally, stopping by the gun chest on the way.
In Carl Sagan’s office everything was calm. Paul was collecting data from the fax machine whilst Sagan, having the office to himself, lay on the floor underneath his desk staring at a picture of the night sky he had made using tiny dots of luminous paint on the underside. Nobody knew Sagan had his map of the night sky and when no one was around he would slide off his chair onto the floor like a child who has gone limp, roll onto his back and will intelligent life to reply to the Arecibo message. He remembered the time he had thought of calling his wife then picked up the phone to discover that she was actually on the line, having only just rung him herself, and he had just picked it up before it rang. Why wasn’t it that easy? Why do we have to wait so long for something that may never happen? He fell asleep to the thought of long distance phone calls clicking together.
After causing a commotion the entire way to Sagan’s office - through corridors of preening students, ugly cafeterias, and endless squealing classrooms - the general finally stood on the threshold of his enemy’s lair. Fearing his dark outline would be seen through the glass in the door he ducked down and leaned on the bottom half of the office door. He pumped the shotgun slowly after wrapping it in his coat and reached for the door handle, opening it and performing an attack roll into the room ending up slightly breathless and unsteady but aiming the shotgun at the empty chair where Sagan should have been sitting. The general scratched his head and laid the shotgun on the desk. Looking around the room it was clear that Sagan spent a lot of time in the office. There were a lot of coffee cups on the desk and crumpled papers in the bin; books open in piles everywhere. The general picked a piece of paper out of the bin and flattened it on the desk. It had a complex equation that the general had seen once before but couldn’t remember where.
“Sir, please, you can’t be in here? My God, don’t shoot me!” A young man carrying a large pile of papers entered the room and was immediately confronted by an armed man turning toward him, albeit an armed man fallen on hard times – the worst kind, in fact.
The general felt all of the rage of a man on a righteous mission return to him, leveled his shotgun at the man, and raised his voice to say:
“Where in hell’s name is that hippy, Sagan?”
The young man dropped all of the papers he was carrying and they smoothed across the floor like a gigantic pack of cards. The general advanced toward him.
“I… He… We… he should be here… I think… I don’t know…” The young man stopped talking, froze mid-babble, as the noise of enormous snoring, which had stopped the general dead too, reached his ears. They both looked toward the no longer innocent desk.
“That’s a pipe, we always hear that, heating or something. Every day, I promise, nothing unusual there.” The young man began to pick up his papers and began talking about normality as if he could return the situation to it if he acted in such a way. But his efforts were strained, like the laughter someone might receive from friends who do not want them to feel bad after telling a poor joke.
“Sagan,” the general shouted, “Wake up, you idiot.”
A grunt and a large bang announced Sagan’s awakening. He appeared from beneath the desk rubbing his head.
“Jesus, Roebuckle, you could have knocked. You scared me. I banged my head.”
“Sorry.” The general lowered his gun, put a hand in a pocket.
“What do you want? You could have phoned.”
“You have to stop,” the general said, getting tough again, pointing the shotgun.
“Stop what? Why do you have a shotgun? And where is the rest of your uniform? You look like shit. Is that confetti on your shoulders?”
“Um…” The general pondered these questions as Sagan picked up the phone on his desk and dialed reception.
“Hello… Jessica… Yes, and the same to you. Listen, could you get me a car to take General Roebuckle to the Holiday Inn on Dean and 4th. Yes, okay, ten minutes is fine.” Sagan looked at the confused figure of the general and decided to use his kind voice:
“General, you look tired. What’s the matter? Did you drive here? All the way?”
“You… In my dreams…” He couldn’t remember. All he could think of was a highway full of soldiers laughing and collapsing into piles.
“You need to have some dreams, general, and some sleep would do you good. Listen, I have ordered a car that will take you to a hotel where you can clean up and get some rest. Then you could come and see me tomorrow, we could talk then.”
“You bastard,” the general mumbled.
“Here, let me take the shotgun. Good, thank you,” Sagan said, taking the shotgun and bag of guns from the general. “Take these away Paul,” Sagan said, handing them to his assistant, then helping the general into a seat.
“There we go general,” then quietly to his assistant, “Hide them, please, Paul.”
“Yes, Dr. Sagan,” Paul said.
“Yes, Dr. Bastard,” the general muttered.
“General, try to be nice. I’m helping you.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I am.”
“Not.”
“What am I doing then?”
“You’re… You are… The naked pictures.” His mind seized on those vitally important words but failed to connect them with the reason for the anger they engendered in him. It was no good. What had seemed so simple and obvious in his office; in the car, was now sand in his fist, lost to his grip.
Sagan put him into the taxi, paying the driver upfront, telling the general to get some rest, have a look around town, stay out of trouble. Just as the car was pulling away Sagan banged on the roof and the driver stopped. Sagan opened the door slightly so he could speak to the general.
“I almost forgot. We pulled the plug on those photos; you were right, they were a little… um… explicit? Come in tomorrow and I’ll show you the new designs. Goodbye.”
Sagan disappeared as the car pulled away. Lying in the back, head lolling with the ruts in the road, the general lay with a smile on his face repeating the words, “The blue light, fucker, the blue light.”
