The Word He Was Looking for Was Hello, Is Anybody Out There?

Because we did not have Us, we invented Them. Then, when They weren’t where and when and how They were supposed to be, We castigated Them for it while secretly damning ourselves for fools because We had thought They might be there.

Dalton’s therapist, one Dr. Arvid Lantz, had brought up the topic of alien races because he thought it might give his client—who had previously evinced an interest in science fiction both written and visual—a way to talk about what Dr. Lantz considered a crippling inability to form intimate connections. A loneliness, self-created and -enforced but no less miserable because of its reflexive origin, pervaded Topolski’s life, his work, his (if you could call them that) relationships. Dr. Lantz did some reading, considered the utility of approaching the patient in his own idiom, and decided on the slightly unorthodox (for a therapist of his theoretical allegiances) tactic of turning his sessions with Topolski into conversations about the deep sources of science fiction’s most enduring tropes.

“Where are they?” Dr. Lantz asked on a sunny October Wednesday. “If there are aliens who can travel across galaxies, wouldn’t they already be here if they wanted to come?”

“I went to a convention once,” Topolski said. “This question apparently comes up a lot. I was there to get an autograph from my favorite writer when I was a kid. He was on this panel and it turned out that the panel discussion was about that question. Everyone just acted superior to everyone else and I never went to another convention. I like the books better when I don’t know anything about the people who write them.”

“That there is no answer. Everybody chooses the things they’re going to believe in and bases all of their speculations on those. Articles of faith is what they are.”

On Dalton’s way to work, radio signals passed through his body. Next to him on the freeway, people talked on their cell phones. Some of them used hands- free devices and some did not. Each of their conversations, transmogrified into electronic signals, passed through Dalton’s body. Radio signals passed through his body. Cosmic rays survived their passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and passed through his body. He was at the center of a million conversations and broadcasts that he would never know existed.

Dalton swung off the highway and onto Table Mesa Drive. He could see NCAR at the top of the aforementioned mesa. In his office, just down the hill from there, his computer was running a SETI@home helper program.

The aliens arrive unobtrusively, in twos and threes, dropping down in entry capsules designed to elude radar detection and aimed at unpopulated areas. Slowly they work their way into the small towns and farming settlements, traveling strangers taciturn and hard-working. Over a period of decades they put down roots. They work their way into the structures of power and governance. Eventually they are elected to positions in national governments. When they reveal themselves, it is too late for anyone to do anything but go along with their plans.

Dalton debated calling his ex- wife. He felt fortunate that they did not hate each other. He was lonely without her, and she without him. Or so she said. Still, they both knew better than to try a reunion. Some events in every life leave a permanent mark. Nietzsche’s famous formulation, in Dalton’s opinion, was flat wrong. That which did not kill you often just crippled you emotionally to the extent that you might as well be dead because as things stood you were just permanently alienated from the possibility of ever having a reciprocal emotional relationship with anyone. Ever again.

The aliens are wavelengths of energy and probability, no doubt responsible for the timing of those dropped calls that created a tense miscommunication culminating in a bitter fight between two people who love each other.

The problem was a daughter. Once he had looked at her face. Just once. But he and Marcia had already known they weren’t staying together when she got pregnant. She wanted to have the baby, sort of just in case, Dalton thought. He had agreed, sort of just in case . . . and then there she was, this tiny girl with dark, dark blue eyes. Dalton looked at her face and wanted to name her.

It wouldn’t have been a good idea. They gave her to the social worker, who assured them that she would be adopted into a good home. She was healthy, white, and an infant. In the adoption market, that made her elite.

“I’m glad we did that,” Marcia said as the social worker walked away. Then she checked her watch. She had an appointment with her lawyer later that morning, Dalton knew. He had an appointment with his, too. Their court date was coming up.

A giant disc-shaped spacecraft composed of a metal that returns a highly unusual spectrographic reading appears in the skies over Big Rock Elementary School in central Michigan. A teacher, Roger Flintough, vanishes out of his classroom, disappearing before the eyes of his second-graders. When he reappears in the classroom thirty seconds later, he tells the class to keep working on their art projects; they have been drawing colorful representations of the ecology in a rain-forest canopy. Walking down the hall to the principal’s office, Flintough announces that the aliens in the giant spacecraft are offering humanity a bargain. When media crews begin to arrive shortly thereafter, he repeats this. What’s the bargain, they want to know.

A ridiculous thing happens. Using machines vast and inscrutable, a race of starfaring aliens creates invisible barriers around the great works of humanity, preserving them for interstellar tourism. But the great works of humanity are not what humanity itself might have guessed. Among them are:

We have already killed the polar bears, Dalton was thinking as he sat in traffic on the Boulder Turnpike listening to earnest, pessimistic voices on the radio. Even if they’re going to be around another fifty years or so.

This is what he told Lantz the next Wednesday. Outside, the bushes were flowering and full of bees. “Right? We screwed things up. Time for the deus ex machina. Or the alien ex space-ina, or something.”

“I can see why difficult times make people want a do-over,” Dr. Lantz said. “But why? What good would it do? If you get a do-over, doesn’t that just encourage you to make the same mistake again instead of learning how to avoid it?”

“If you’re talking about the polar bears, we know how to avoid it. We just didn’t.” It was almost the end of one of Lantz’s fifty-minute hours. Dalton slow-walked the conversation the rest of the way, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself. Lantz knew he was doing it, and let Dalton know in his oh-so-nonjudgmental-therapist kind of way.

“If there are Grays, let them come and get me,” he said to his shrink. “I’ll even deal with the anal probes. Whatever. Just let me know you’re out there.”

The alien is discovered cold and hungry, dying, in the woods behind an ordinary exurban subdivision. It is killed accidentally—but not really—and when the police arrive, they and the landowner agree that they’ll dig a hole and forget the whole thing. On their way home, the police debate whether they should have gotten in touch with the FBI. But who wants the feds involved?

On Dalton’s computer screen, a sinuous graphic told him either that the aliens weren’t out there yet or that the SETI people hadn’t yet learned how to look.

A nine-year-old boy in South Portland, Maine, looking at the moon through a telescope he got for Christmas, says, “Daddy, there’s a building on the moon.” His father is looking in another direction, having vaguely untoward and thoroughly unoriginal thoughts about the positioning of the Orion Nebula. “Doubt it, pal,” he says. “But let’s have a look.” The boy’s older sister is already looking. “Yep,” she says. “There sure is. Who built a building on the moon?” The father looks. Yep. There sure is.

Sometimes he thought Marcia was right, that what he was planning and trying to find a way to accomplish was nothing more than an acknowledgment of something that had already happened. He tried this idea out on Dr.

Lantz, who said, “Listen. It’s a big empty universe out there. Right? Except no. It’s full of stars and nebulae and dark matter and mystery. Mystery, Dalton! That’s what the universe is made of, and it’s big enough that no matter how much we learn about it, it will always be made of mystery. If that’s what you’re having a problem with, stop talking about your ex-wife or this daughter you gave up for adoption.”

Lantz flipped through his notes. “Here’s what you said about her back when we first started meeting. ‘We gave you a start,’ you said was your thinking then. And you did. In a way, it’s all anyone can ask. So why the guilt?”

Later that day, Dalton stared at his computer screen as his machine sifted through signals. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? That a signal would come, or had come, or was coming?

The problem was that time was big, bigger than space, and Dalton Topolski was so, so small. All of the conversations in the universe passed through and around him. He could not stop them, couldn’t bend them around to come his way again.

On a September Wednesday, military radars across the world detect a swarm of small vehicles descending into the atmosphere. Efforts to shoot them down are unsuccessful. Spreading out into a flight pattern calculated to overfly the Earth’s entire surface in a maximally efficient manner, these drones release an aerosolized nanovirus tailored to interfere with the absorption of oxygen into the blood. After that, there is little to report.

Dr. Lantz looked at him. “It is a word that locates an event in time with respect to the speaker’s present,” he said. “I’m not sure what’s exceptional about that.”

“What you mean is how can you still be so convinced that you did the wrong thing giving up your daughter,” Dr. Lantz said. “Listen, Dalton. You keep constructing this elaborate superstructure about alien life and time and space and the nature of the universe because you can’t face the fact that you’re not happy because when you go home at night, you’re alone. Until you face that and stop trying to put an extraterrestrial face on it, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

The aliens are us, and our desire for them is the yearning of any sentient organism to know its origins. Where did we come from? We rode the chariots of the gods across the holographic universe, panspermiatically herding comets toward a universal amnesia that survives only as a longing we get when we look at the stars, for reasons we are never quite able to articulate.

She would be fourteen years old. She would know that she was born in Denver, but she could be anywhere. In four years she might choose to find out who her birth parents are, and she might arrive bright-eyed and curious. Or she might arrive sullen and angry. Or she might not arrive at all. Dalton thought these thoughts while he watched his computer analyze the background noise of the universe. In his head he answered Dr. Lantz’s question. So what if I am, he thought.

The mountains were high. The universe was big. The future was too uncertain to endure. Water was wet and prevented the proper function of the lungs. There was a place he knew where people were not supposed to climb near a waterfall because it was dangerous. It was in Boulder Canyon, not far from a sign that said in case of flash flood, motorists should climb to safety.

Dalton Topolski thought that maybe irony was the last straw. The irony of her coming to look and him being gone, the irony of him holding on because she might come to look and then her never doing it. . . .

The next morning he was still staring at his computer screen and it was still doing the same thing and nothing had changed inside Dalton Topolski’s head except a modulation of curiosity toward resolution. He thought he had everything worked out. What else was there to say? It was the easiest thing in the world to die. No one was out there who cared.

When they’re standing at adjacent urinals in the men’s room of a Best Buy on Wadsworth Avenue in Lake-wood, Colorado, one man (who is actually not a man) says to another, “I want to tell you a secret.”