It was early in October 1949 when I finished the reversal of our
space-exploration plans. I spent the next two days running down a
sighting report from a town in Pennsylvania. Like three or four other
tips that had seemed important at first, it turned out to be a dud.
When I got back home, I found Ken Purdy had been trying to reach me. I
phoned him at True, and he asked me to fly up to New York the next day.
“I’ve just heard there’s another magazine working on the saucer story,”
he told me.
“Who is it?” I said.
“I don’t know yet. It may be just a rumor, but we can’t take a chance.
We’ve got to get this in the January book.”
That night I gathered up all the material. It looked hopeless to
condense it into one article, and I knew that Purdy had even more
investigators’ reports waiting for me in New York. Flying up the next
morning, I suddenly thought of a talk I’d had with an air transport
official. It was in Washington; I had just told him about the
investigation.
“If they are spacemen,” he said, “they’d probably have a hard time
figuring out this country by listening to our broadcasts. Imagine
tuning in soap operas, ‘The Lone Ranger,’ and a couple of crime yarns,
along with newscasts about strikes and murders and the cold war. They
might pick up some of those kid programs about rocket ships. A few days
of listening to that stuff—well, it would give them one hell of a
picture.”
Except for some hoax reports, this was the first funny suggestion I’d
had about the spacemen. But now, thinking seriously about it, I
realized he had an important point. It was possible that men from
another planet might have to reorient even their way of thinking to
understand the earth’s ways. It would not be automatic, despite their
superior technical progress. Evolution might have produced basic
differences in their understanding of life. Humor, for instance, might
be totally lacking in their make-up.
What would they be like?
I’d tried to imagine how they might look, without getting anywhere. Dr.
H. Spencer Jones hadn’t helped much with his _Life on Other Worlds_. I
couldn’t begin to visualize beings with totally different cells,
perhaps able to take terrific heat or bitter cold as merely normal
weather.
There were all kinds of possibilities. If they lived on Mars, for
instance, perhaps they couldn’t take the heavier gravity of the earth.
They might be easily subject to our diseases, especially if they had
destroyed disease germs on their planet—a natural step for an advanced
race.
It was possible, I knew, that the spacemen might look grotesque to us.
But I clung to a Stubborn feeling that they would resemble man. That
came, of course, from an inborn feeling of man’s superiority over all
living things. It carried over into a feeling that any thinking,
intelligent being, whether on Mars or Wolf 359’s planets, should have
evolved in the same form.
I gave up trying to imagine how the spacemen might look. There was
simply nothing to go on. But there were strong indications of how they
thought and reacted. Certain qualities were plainly evident.
_Intelligence_. No one could dispute that. It took a high order of
mentality to construct and operate a space ship.
_Courage_. It would take brave men to face the hazards of space.
_Curiosity_. Without this quality, they would never have thought to
explore far-distant planets.
There were other qualities that seemed almost equally certain. These
spacemen apparently lacked belligerence; there had been no sign of
hostility through all the years. They were seemingly painstaking and
extremely methodical.
It was still not much of a picture. But somehow, it was encouraging.
Glancing down from the plane’s window, I thought: How does this look to
them? Our farms, our cities, the railroads there below; the highways,
with the speeding cars and trucks; the winding river, and far off to
the right, the broad stretch of the Atlantic. What would they think of
America?
Manhattan came into sight, as the pilot let down for the landing. An
odd thought popped into my mind. How would a spaceman react if he saw a
Broadway show?
Not long before, I had seen South Pacific. I could still hear Ezio
Pinza’s magnificent voice as he sang “Some Enchanted Evening.”
Was music a part of spacemen’s lives, or would it be something new and
strange, perhaps completely distasteful?
They might live and think on a coldly intelligent level, without a
touch of what we know as emotion. To them, our lives might seem
meaningless and dull. We ourselves might appear grotesque in form.
But in their progress, there must have been struggle, trial and error,
some feeling of triumph at success. Surely these would be emotional
forces, bound to reflect in the planet races. Perhaps, in spite of some
differences, we would find a common bond—the bond of thinking,
intelligent creatures trying to better themselves.
The airliner landed and taxied in to unload.
As I went down the gangway I suddenly realized something. My last vague
fear was gone.
It had not been a personal fear of the visitors from space. It had been
a selfish fear of the impact on my life. I realized that now.
It might be a long time before they would try to make contact. But I
had a conviction that when it came, it would be a peaceful mission, not
an ultimatum. It could even be the means of ending wars on earth.
But I had been conditioned to this thing. I had had six months of
preparation, six months to go from complete skepticism to slow, final
acceptance.
What if it had been thrown at me in black headlines?
Even a peaceful contact by beings from another planet would profoundly
affect the world. The story in _True_ might play an important part in
that final effect. Carefully done, it could help prepare Americans for
the official disclosure.
But if it weren’t done right, we might be opening a Pandora’s box.