Second Contact, page 19
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“First the laughter curtain, and now the c-word?” Billy said, grinning through the words. “Wow. If I didn’t already know you were hiding something, I sure as hell would now. Before I explain that, I want to encourage everyone out there to retain and utilise their own logical faculties through all of this — don’t just listen to the established authorities or any other predominant figures, including myself.”
“Get to the point, Billy,” Godfrey sighed.
“As you wish. But let me tell you this: when you try to substantiate an idea by throwing the word consensus at anyone who disagrees with it, I’m not just sceptical of your assertion… I’m suspicious of your motive. Facts are facts and evidence is evidence, and if yours were as convincing as you pretend they are then you wouldn’t need to do this. If the data and facts could stand on their own two feet, you would let them. I don’t care how many of your people share the same interpretation of the data. I want to see the data.”
“I fully agree,” Jack Neal said.
Wisely, Billy ignored Jack altogether. “There is an agenda at play when it comes to what data is allowed to become public, but this is deeper than that,” he continued. “To put it simply, we have lost our humility. We, as a culture, have come to believe two very dangerous things. Our first dangerous belief is that we know everything there is to know. And our second, even more dangerous belief, is that everything we know is correct. Across all disciplines, we have lost our desire for discovery and discarded it in favour of a craving for confirmation. That’s why today, whenever any kind of intellectually challenging discovery or dogma-smashing breakthrough is posited, people like Godfrey shout it down for daring to question the consensus. These are the hallmarks of a civilisation in decline, and it’s important that we catch them before they get away from us.”
As everyone turned to Marian de Clerk to see who would be invited to respond first to Billy’s impassioned comments, Focus 20/20’s well-respected host shifted in her chair and looked down at the unseen tablet computer built into her desk. “With less than a minute remaining in our first segment, I’ve just been alerted to a truly extraordinary development,” she said. “I’m told that the document you’re all about to see has been verified by several extremely senior GSC employees, and the network has clearly seen sufficient evidence to feel confident in encouraging me to air this. Mr Kendrick, your feed will temporarily disappear from the screen as I show this document to our panelists, but your voice will still be heard. You will see the document, too.”
“Interesting…” Billy said.
“So without further ado,” de Clerk announced. She then tapped a menu option to initiate the change on the giant screen. Sure enough, Billy disappeared. In one sense that was a shame, because the document that took his place raised an incredulous smile on his face that could have become an iconic reaction image.
In the studio, William Godfrey tried to hide a scowl as he looked immediately and instinctively towards Timo Fiore. Timo likewise tried to hide a grin as wide as Billy’s.
“As you should now be able to see,” de Clerk addressed the viewers at home, “a leaked memo from the GSC’s headquarters has come into our possession. And as you can imagine, the second part of today’s panel will now focus squarely on its content. Join us after these short messages for what is sure to be our most explosive segment ever.”
“I knew it!” Billy’s voice rang through the studio. He then quoted the leaked document in a mocking newsreader-like tone: “‘It is our belief that the Kerguelen event was not just highly irregular, but observably unnatural.’ Game over, Godfrey. The GSC leak is out!”
Timo glanced across the desk at Godfrey and winked in victory.
One Emma Ford was all he needed.
C minus 51
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Eighteen hundred miles from New York, Dan McCarthy sat in the same kind of speechless shock as the Focus 20/20 panelists who had just learned that William Godfrey had indeed been covering up data-informed suspicions that the Kerguelen bolide was an unnatural event.
That something about the bolide wasn’t natural came as no surprise to Dan; thanks to the painful jolt in his neck during the event, he had known that something unnatural was going on before he even knew what it was. It did surprise him that GSC researchers had seen enough to voice their controversial scientific opinions, and it amazed him that their collectively signed memo had now become public despite Godfrey’s best efforts to suppress it.
If Dan could have changed anything, he would have changed Focus 20/20’s rules to allow Timo and Emma to talk strategy backstage during the commercial break. If he had known that Emma and Timo had set the leak in motion with some help from Alessandro Bonucci and Dan’s other old friends in Timo’s Italian observatory, he wouldn’t have worried about this.
During a short commercial break in which Henry said very little — a point Dan didn’t mind, given his desire to avoid any conversations that could lead to an accidental slip of the tongue — Clark finally arrived home from his overtime session at the precinct. He walked in wearing his police uniform and with a brown briefcase in his hand.
Dan had barely ever seen Clark holding so much as a pen, let alone a briefcase, and if his mind hadn’t been otherwise occupied he would likely have laughed and made a quip about how he looked like a gorilla dressed up as a police officer on the first day of his new job in the big city.
“How are you guys doing?” Clark asked. Still annoyed at Dan for telling Timo without clearing it with him and Emma, he looked only at Henry despite addressing the question to both of them.
“Not bad,” Henry said. “This thing is getting more exciting than I thought it would be.”
Clark looked at the TV, still airing ads, then to the clock on the wall. “Shit, I didn’t even realise the time. I’ll grab a drink and you guys can catch me up on what’s happened so far.”
“Someone at the GSC leaked a memo about Kerguelen,” Henry said, seeing no sense in waiting until Clark was back from the kitchen. “Apparently they have data that makes them think the bolide wasn’t a natural event, and apparently Godfrey has been actively trying to cover it up. Looks like Kendrick was right. Who’d’ve thought it, huh?”
Clark emerged from the kitchen with no drink in his hand, staring at Dan to try to read his mood without saying anything in front of Henry.
In the absence of any knowledge of actual sign language, Dan resorted to the clearest gestures he could think of. First he pointed to an imaginary watch on his wrist and quickly held up two fingers followed by a circle shape for zero. Twenty minutes. He then pointed to the basement before making a talking sign with his hand. We need to talk.
Clark shrugged, with palms as well as shoulders, then mouthed the word “why?”.
As subtly as he could, Dan put his hands together in a sleep sign beside his head then tapped the back of his neck. This wasn’t accurate in the strictest sense — this time, he had been summoned to the cornfield in his sleep without having felt any jolts in his neck — but it got the point across.
After standing with wide eyes for several seconds, Clark held out his right hand with the thumb outstretched, alternating between a thumbs-up and thumbs-down.
Dan gave a thumbs-up.
Clark went back into the kitchen and quickly returned to the couch with beers for him and Henry and a giant energy drink for Dan. His anger over the Timo incident seemed to have faded, for now at least, and Dan was glad to see it.
“Okay,” Clark said, opening his beer as the show returned from the commercial break. “Time to watch Godfrey squirm.”
C minus 50
RMXT Studio #1
Manhattan, New York
Given the lack of a live studio audience, there was no hubbub or commotion when the Focus 20/20 panelists returned to tens of millions of screens around the country.
What there was in the studio was a decidedly changed atmosphere. Billy Kendrick couldn’t have hidden his beaming smile had he wanted to, while even William Godfrey’s best efforts to look calm in the face of an unexpected reveal weren’t up to the task. Godfrey had expected the stupid memo to leak at some point, but the timing — while he was on live TV, surrounded by gloating rivals and with nowhere to hide — could not have been worse.
On the show’s return to air, Marian de Clerk announced that the second topic, already delightfully titled ‘Transparency at the GSC’ would now commence. She pointed towards the giant screen which was now split to show Billy Kendrick on one side and the leaked memo responsible for his cheery demeanour on the other.
“This revelation that senior GSC scientists have advised you of their belief that the Kerguelen event was unnatural changes everything, Chairman Godfrey… does it not?” de Clerk asked. “It certainly appears to vindicate the earlier claims of a ‘GSC cover-up’ we’ve heard from Mr Kendrick and others like him.”
Godfrey cleared his throat. Heads would roll for this — he would see to that — but right now he had a job to do. A brief discussion with his roomful of aides and advisors during the commercial break would have been most helpful, but the schematics of the studio complex would have made that impossible even if new rules hadn’t recently forbade panelists from accessing any external information from the first to the last minute of the taping. This gave live-via-satellite guests like Billy Kendrick a tremendous advantage since they could do whatever they wanted off-screen, but Godfrey knew that raising the issue of this particular unfairness would have made him look weak in a moment which called for strength and poise.
“There is absolutely nothing decisive in this memo,” he said, “which is precisely why there have been no announcements. Yes, I have seen it; and yes, I have taken it into consideration. But there’s something everyone has to understand here: it’s okay for the likes of Timo and Billy to demand comments from me on every little thing, but there is a bigger picture that they don’t have to think about. Stability, security, continuity… these are the things they’re clearly not thinking about when they make incendiary comments about cover-ups and baseless comparisons between the GSC and the IDA. Tell me, are the police and the courts covering something up when they’re too busy investigating a missing person’s last recorded movements to host a press conference every five minutes? No! And are we covering something up when we do the equivalent? Of course not!”
Godfrey’s tone and body language made it clear that he wasn’t finished.
“This so-called leak is not a problem,” he continued. “This is merely a symptom of a teething problem I have been trying to mitigate for months: the problem of deep-rooted self-interest within certain GSC departments and divisions whose staff oppose the democratic will of the member states who unanimously voted, just around the corner from here at the UN, to select me as the inaugural GSC Chairman. Any organisation as ambitious as the GSC is bound to encounter these kinds of teething problems simply because there are so many competing interests within our organisation, even more so than there are within a national government. I’d go as far as to say that the GSC’s broad member base has more agendas than a meeting room table. Unfortunately, in this case our existing instrumentation hasn’t been firm enough to curtail the self-interested signatories of this speculative memo. What I can promise the citizens of our planet today is that I will purge the GSC of those individuals and groups who value their own agendas more highly than this planet’s safety and stability. They’ll be watching this now; smiling at each other, clinking their champagne glasses, thinking they’ve got one over on old Godfrey. Well… we’ll see how that works out for them, won’t we?”
“Purge is a very strong word,” Marian de Clerk said, prodding Godfrey to expand on his surprisingly aggressive defence.
“This is a very serious situation,” he replied, “and my anger is very strong. Our recent collective history places us in a very peculiar moment in time; for given how fresh our memories of the IDA leak remain, it would be extremely natural for people to jump on this and think that the same kind of thing is going on all over again. But in the simplest terms: I am not Richard Walker and the GSC is not the IDA. There was a cover-up in Colorado Springs, as we all know. What I can categorically state right now is that there is no cover-up in Buenos Aires; no cover-up regarding the Kerguelen bolide, and no cover-up regarding anything else.”
Timo Fiore, whose last-minute actions with Emma Ford had made him hopeful that some information would leak from the GSC during the show, hadn’t even dreamed that it would be anything so clear-cut as a memo which outright contradicted Godfrey’s earlier comments and was signed by several respected scientists. It had been a simple appeal, with Timo’s trusted staff at his Cavalieri Observatory doing the grunt work of contacting their many friends around the world who worked in previously national observatories and facilities now administered by the GSC. Before long, two distinct but anonymous employees who had seen the well-circulated memo within the GSC’s Buenos Aires HQ shared it with Timo’s staff. Minutes later, it was on Marian de Clerk’s desk and countless screens around the world.
And given the number of GSC employees of various seniorities and nationalities who had already publicly questioned why the observational findings which led the signatories to call the bolide “observably unnatural” hadn’t been shared with all research facilities as was explicitly mandated by GSC protocol, it was starting to look like William Godfrey wouldn’t have many employees left if his promised purge extended to all of the openly insubordinate.
Jack Neal wasn’t sporting as wide a grin as Timo might have expected, instead taking care not to outwardly support the leaking of classified information even though it weakened Godfrey tremendously. Inside, however, he was nothing but gleeful.
“If you’re willing to cover this up…” Joe Crabbe snarled at Godfrey. “Hell, I’m starting to think you really might be up to something big. Your men — and women, before any precious pansies jump down my throat — they’ve already detected a serious unnatural incident within our atmosphere and tried to hide its unnaturalness from all of us. If you go on to detect something even more serious, why should we believe that you’d be ready or even willing to deal with it?”
Godfrey shook his head and looked at Marian de Clerk. “This is the kind of hysteria I’m talking about: paranoid fantasies mixed with baseless fear-mongering. Your network should seriously consider the kind of guests you invite for serious discussions; responsible broadcasting is more than a buzzword, it’s a necessity.”
At last, Timo broke his post-leak silence. “You speak again of responsibility, Chairman Godfrey. First you call me irresponsible for announcing my Fiore Frontiere venture, and now you accuse the network of being irresponsible for inviting guests who dare to give you a hard time. But only one person on this panel is guilty of acting with reckless irresponsibility — not just recently, but over the past year — and it’s neither myself nor even Joe Crabbe. With unprecedented funding pooled from the combined budgets of every national space agency your organisation has consumed, topped up even further with vast additional contributions from your primary member states, you have developed almost nothing beyond an ostentatious HQ complex. At this point, you don’t even appear capable of fulfilling the original Global Shield Commission’s remit of protecting Earth from external threats!”
“Fear-mongering,” Godfrey said. “Again. Gather round children, here comes Mr Fiore to tell us all that the sky is falling. And I wonder who just so happens to be the only man who can save us?”
“Regrettably, that may be the case,” Timo replied. “Among those with the means, who else has the desire? You can call me crazy, you can laugh at me for saying the sky is falling, you can say what you like. The subject of planetary defence is indeed one part of Fiore Frontiere’s long-term focus, but I chose not to let it dominate my announcement because, well, to be blunt, people don’t like to hear about this. But that doesn’t mean the threats aren’t real, Chairman Godfrey; you know that as well as I do.”
Godfrey nodded slightly, as though deciding it was wise to be seen to agree with at least part of what Timo was saying. “For once, Mr Fiore, you are making some degree of sense. The difference between us, again, is that I have to act and speak responsibly. Just because you don’t see what we are doing behind the scenes, that doesn’t mean we’re not doing it.”
“And I would like nothing more than for my scientists to cooperate with the many great minds whose national agencies have been consumed by the GSC,” Timo said, “but unfortunately, thanks to people like you, that is proving politically impossible.”
Godfrey shook his head, quickly past agreeing with anything Timo said. “I think you mean fortunately, Mr Fiore. At its core, the GSC is democratically governed, and there is a very good reason that checks are in place to prevent repulsively wealthy individuals such as yourself from being able to dictate to heads of governments as you see fit.”
From the giant screen, Billy Kendrick interjected: “No one is dictating anything! Timo wants to throw private money at public problems which at some point we are going to have to address, and you’re standing in his way.”
To the discomfort of some viewers and panellists, Timo and Billy spent the next few minutes rallying for serious investment in planetary defence by discussing specific threats Earth could face in the foreseeable future, some considerably more plausible and potentially catastrophic than others.
