The First Signs of Life

I was there at the start of things, that very first day that life was discovered on another planet.

 

I was fixing the Chief Astronomer a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, when he confided in me.
“I’ve found something,” he said.

 

“What, in the bagel?”

 

“No, no, I mean us, the observatory. The radio telescopes have made a discovery. A planet …” He stretched his arms out wide like a boastful fishermen, “8.5 light years from here, but we’ve found oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, which means we’ve found life.”

 

“Wow,” I said, “that’s big news. Have you told the President?”

 

“Not yet. We have to be 100% sure before we make an announcement. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

 
“Wow,” I said again.

 

“Outside the team, I mean. Within these walls it’s not a secret, but outside …” he placed his finger on his lips.

 

So I kept schtum, like a good bagel chef in an observatory that has just discovered extraterrestrial life. You’d never believe that we’d made some earth-shattering discovery, over the next few weeks and months nothing changed; the scientists would come into the cafeteria, I’d make them a salt beef bagel, maybe a bagel with cinnamon and scrambled egg, sometimes a smoked haddock with red onion and cream cheese, we’d chat about the football and they’d go back to their telescopes. Sure, everyone was working long hours, but that wasn’t unusual. That’s the nature of star watching, everyone works late into the night.

 

“So how’s ET?” I said to the Chief Astronomer one day.

 

“We publish on Tuesday,” he said. “Stock up with bagels that day, this place will become a madhouse.”

 

Boy, what an understatement that turned out to be. The cafeteria was full all day, I mean thirty or forty people standing full, queue stretching out of sight, a million miles, who knows maybe stretching into outer space, journalists, scientists from other observatories and members of the public, all crammed into the observatory. There was nothing for the public to see, ironically there were no tours that day, but nevertheless they came in droves just to chomp a bagel in the same building as our telescope.

 

The Chief Astronomer came round to thank every single employee personally for their contribution to the work, even me, the lunch-order chef. "Without your delicious bagels," he'd said, "we'd never have had the energy to keep searching the stars."

 

The President came to visit the observatory the next day, to mark what he called "An historic landmark in man's understanding of the universe." He met many of the staff involved in the discovery. I didn't get to meet him myself, but his wife, the First Lady, came into the kitchens and we shared a joke about how we both cooked for the most important people in the world. I gave her my old family recipe for hot salt beef bagel. She said she’d make it for the President. 

 

The media fell on us like a swarm, everyone was interviewed about their role in the discovery, even me. I joked how I'd open a bagel store on Omega 5 now that I knew there was a marketable opportunity. My remark was a hit with the media, light relief for the 24-hour news channels, and I became a minor celebrity, appearing on numerous news and talk shows over the next few weeks.

 

The media fed on the story of the discovery for weeks, every newspaper cartoon featured green, antennaed aliens. Nearly all the press was favorable at first, celebrating the American scientists who'd made another great leap forward for mankind. Only a few of the far-right websites dissented from this view, saying that we made up the findings just to get more government grants. The public was, in the main, pleased to know that we weren't alone in the universe. It somehow took some of the pressure off mankind's shoulders.

 

As weeks passed though, a few religious leaders started to speak out against the discovery. The Chief Astronomer showed me some of the articles he'd collected. I always took the Chief Astronomer a breakfast bagel if he'd worked an all-night shift, which in recent times had been most nights.

 

"Look at these," he said, tossing me a pile of press clippings. I read through them as ordered. Religious leader after religious leader attacked our discovery. ”The bible said that mankind was special, therefore proving that there is life on other planets is blasphemous,” was the typical argument.

 

"What's an astronomer to do?" the Chief Astronomer asked me mid-bagel, spitting crumbs at me as he did so. "Should scientists stop reporting the truth in case it offends?"

 

He then reached in another drawer and pulled out another pile of papers, this time all letters and printed-off emails. I read the first one: ”If you want life on other planets you should go and live there, you atheist scum.” The next email was more succinct, it just said: “I hope you die.”

 

I looked up in shock and the Chief Astronomer laughed at me. "There's a lot worse than that," he said. "There are at least twenty death threats in that pile and some of the language is shocking, more ‘f’s and ‘c’s than you’d believe. Over two hundred of those letters altogether."

 

"But why?"

 

"I guess these people just don't like their views challenged. Would rather live in ignorance. I guess it would be like your reaction if science proved that bagels were bad for you."

 

"I wouldn't mind that much. I’d just become a pancake chef instead."

 

The Chief Astronomer laughed and said that he guessed it would all blow over in a few weeks. He couldn't have been more wrong.

 

xxx

 

We all thought this religious claptrap was something of a joke, at least until Pastor Kenny Abraham came along. He was just a minor pastor from the backwaters of Nevada, but somehow, overnight, he was everywhere. I remember the first time I saw him.

 

It was late at night and the Chief Astronomer was slumped at a table, goggling his eyes at the TV screen. I walked over and handed him a toasted turkey bagel.

 

“What’s this?” I asked, nodding at the TV screen.
“The enemy,” he said.

 

I watched the interview, though it wasn’t really an interview, more a lecture. The interviewer just nodded and smiled at him, never raising a word in query or criticism.  Abraham was just allowed to splutter out his spiel.

 

“We, as good Christians, must accept the truth shown to us by science. There is life on Omega 5. Aliens do exist.”

 

“He doesn’t sound so bad,” I started to say, but the Chief Astronomer shushed me and we watched Abraham continue.

 

“The stories of UFO sightings, abductions, even of alien rape, have been true all along. Whatever these aliens are, they are not God's creation. The Bible is clear on this point, the Earth is the centre of God's universe, it was created for man by God, for man to serve God's will. These aliens, therefore, must be the creation of the Devil, here to subvert God's plan. They are, by their very existence, our enemy.”

 

“We don't know what these aliens are planning, but can we afford to take a chance? To take a chance with our very lives, with the lives of our sons and daughters, with everything the good Lord created. That is why I have formed the Just in Case Party. The Party calls for a pre-emptive strike against these aliens before they destroy us.”

 

"Ridiculous, isn't it?" said the Chief Astronomer. "You'd think we'd seen a fleet of alien warships all ready to launch, not just a bunch of gases. In all probability all we’ve found is evidence of basic life, bacteria or the alien equivalent. No reason at all to think there's any intelligent life out there. None down here by the look of it," he added, spluttering at his own joke.

 

He paused to take a swig of Pepsi, for some reason he refused to drink Coke, though me personally, I can never tell the difference. I'd fail the Pepsi challenge every time.

 

"Besides, Omega 5 is 8.5 light years away. It might not sound like much, but even with the very best technology and limitless money, it would take 175,000 years for any ship from Earth to get there, most likely it would take any aliens a similar time to reach us. How the heck can you have a war if it takes that takes several thousand lifetimes to reach your enemy?"

 

The Chief Astronomer burst into a round of deep laughter, interspersed with burping, that lasted a good five minutes. Abraham’s rants were so absurd you had to laugh, or at least that's how it seemed then.

 

A few months late, the Just in Case Party won over half of the seats at the Senate elections and a big chunk of the seats in Congress. They ate into the votes of Republican and Democrat, but mostly Republican. So successful were they at winning the hearts of the Christian right, that the Republicans were forced into the only action left in light of their plummeting vote, merging with the new party.

 

If the Republicans hoped to check the movement by moderating the message, they failed. Two years down the line, Pastor Abraham stood for President as joint Republican and Just in Case Party candidate and won by the biggest majority in American electoral history.

 

His first act was to raise taxes, not in the way that a Democrat raises taxes, half-heartedly and ineffectively, but in the way that only a God-fearing man of war can raise taxes. My pay check was half gone by the time it reached me.  To appease the Republicans he cut spending on all non-defense-related areas, scrapping Medicare altogether and halving all benefits. Poor people were attacked for not earning enough, "underfunding God" President Abraham called it, and had their taxes raised still further.  

 

All the taxes and savings were dedicated to building the Just In Case Fleet, a collection of space-ready craft armed with nuclear warheads and the latest missile technology. Our observatory kept its funding, but only because our work was crucial in guiding the fleet to the enemy. Scientists were condemned and hated by the government, but they were the only ones who could deliver God's supposed will by building the ships.

 

Within a mere five years the Family Fleet was ready. It was called the Family Fleet, as President Abraham had stipulated that only good Christian husbands and wives could serve on the ships. The ships would be manned by just two couples to start with, but these would be tasked with raising an army for when the fleet arrived in 175,000 years time.

 

The first ship was to be launched on July 4. The whole country was watching as President Abraham made ready to cut the ribbon and launch the first ship.

Of course, though it was a public holiday, all leave was cancelled for all essential services, yes even for the lunch order chef at an observatory. A big screen filled the canteen and the eyes of all staff were on it, focusing everyone's attention the way a great lie had focused our nation for the last five years. Pastors, priests, nuns, imams, rabbis, all denominations were there to pray for a happy outcome to the war.

 

I sat with the Chief Astronomer as we watched the countdown and saw the first of the ships preparing to take off to a fanfare, much waving of flags and a seemingly eternal performance of the star spangled banner.

 

"Of course, you realize the ships will never get there," he confided to me as he toyed with a toasted cream cheese cinnamon bagel. "Every single scientist involved in the project has played their part in sabotaging it. Myself, I've carefully forgotten to make any allowance for Omega 5's moons, with any luck the fleet will just plough into them. Not that they'll get that far, everybody shares my views, everybody's doing shoddy work, slight mistakes that won't get noticed but won't damn well work, that's for sure. Even the seatbelts are an inch short. I wouldn't be surprised if the ship just goes up in flames on the launch-pad."

 

I watched the launch in a new light, suddenly expecting to see July 4th fireworks. Loss of life is tragic, true, but it was harder to feel sympathy for these people, the Family Fleeters, who were perfectly happy to carry out genocide ‘just in case’. The countdown began: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five and then silence, as if the announcer had simply forgotten how to count.

 

A burst of flame emerged from the bottom of the ship and it started to rise. They say that if anything is going to go wrong, most likely it'll happen in the first 30 seconds after takeoff. We counted them down, as the ship rose into the sky. No disaster, the first of the fleet was launched. The countdown to intergalactic war had officially begun.

 

We sat staring at the screen for a long time, our bagels in front of us, untouched.

 

We were still sitting there when we heard about the Chinese invasion, after which we watched every second of news. We watched the entire US fleet taken out in 13 minutes. "We threw everything we had at them," claimed some general or other, but of course we had nothing to throw: We had 274 intergalactic spacecraft, but no planes, no ships, no ground-troops. If the Chinese had invaded from space we'd have slaughtered them. As it was they slaughtered us.

 

We sat there long into the night, both of us unable to move our eyes from the screen. At just after midnight I made the Chief Astronomer a roast chicken and green pepper bagel and a turkey and red onion for myself. We fell asleep, woke up and watched some more. We were still there early next morning to see President Abraham sign the treaty of surrender: we watched him hand over the keys to the land of the free.

 

Our long, long silence was finally broken by an enraged scream from the Chief Astronomer. "Just in case of what, exactly?" he shouted at the TV. "Just in case of what?"