Elements of fear, Seven

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My calculation of the time left until Visitor arrives in the vicinity of Earth now gives us a little over one day. 

    How should this time to be used?

    From my developing belief in Schyler’s letter to me from 20 years ago, and it’s linkage to a date 50 years in the future  – I  am not as concerned about the approach of this alien object as I would be if I did not have Schyler’s message.  The fact that Schyler predicts something 50 years ahead is more terrifying than an alien intelligence arriving soon.

    That is a pretty "warped" view, I think.  But it is my view.. 

    It is mid-after noon and after the last quickie National Academy of Sciences panel meeting, in Washington,  Bill Harrison, Fred Williams and I, all, with regret, decline to be active in the Alien Greeting Panels the President’s office suggested be established. 

 

 

    This might objectively be a good idea, but I do not think our presence on an Alien Greeting Panel, along with a group of scientists and engineers working as the Government’s Representatives of the United States would be a necessary or useful function at this time.

    I am not going to talk to death something with no meaningful global structure.  If I think I can do some good later, I will.   Schyler's message suggests my unavoidable contribution is my power of the procreation of a unique offspring.  How can I not use his message as a shield?

Image: MDC archives, Visitor from near Saguache,Colorado, sent to M J Garris.

    I have Schyler Marshall’s letter.  The single fact of the letter's existence contains within it the most terrifying information, and yet is the only justification I have to supply a stable foundation for my “decisions.” 

    The clearest mandates I have, as yet unfulfilled, and with no escape clauses, are contained in Schyler’s statements “learn about gardening from the best of gardeners,” whatever that means . . .  and my having an important granddaughter . . .  and she to argue humanity’s case.  .  .  must come into existence  . . . which only means bloodline, and that requires of me at least a clearly singular participation.   I’m going to have a baby! . . .  I am going to give birth to at least one child . . .  I am certain of that.  Could there be more?  I’m too old . . . I think . . . realizing again, like all women do,  our species reproduction and future is tied completely to women . . . The investment a women is required to make . . . is not only life-threatening, it is currently humanity’s only certain survival mechanism.

    Schyler’s words thrust themselves verbatim into my mind, appearing as they do on the paper of the letter . . .

    You will also learn about gardening from the best of gardeners!
   
Misty, your granddaughter is still a good many years away.  She will argue humanity’s case. You remember we briefly discussed her?  You will have choices of great importance to make.

 
    We "discoverers" of Visitor return to our hotel.  We sit in the glass enclosed and covered “outdoor” garden section attached to the suite of hotel rooms the Secret Service arranged for us in our visit to Washington.  Carol Anne and daughter Cheryl sit with me at the circular canopied glass garden table, while Fred and Bill slip out to get us some soda drinks.  The “garden” is cooled and air-conditioned, or it would be muggy-hot in Washington. 

    Carol Anne says, “Misty, I want to beg-off on the shopping – even if Cheryl gets upset about it.”

“Ah Mom, I won’t get upset.” Cheryl says. “We can shop some other time.  I think everyone’s attention is focused somewhere else, anyway.”

    That is a reasonably mature answer from a 16-year old, considering the events.

    I ask. “But the next question is this: Where do we want to be when Visitor arrives, a little later than this time tomorrow?” 

    Carol Anne nods.  I can see her wonder where I'm going with this.

    I smile, trying to set her at ease, and say, “I have ordered two of my company’s executive heavy duty jets to standby so they can be here later this evening -- if I call in the next 20 minutes or so. . . .”

Cheryl says, “You have Company Jets?”

    “Yes, I do, Cheryl.” I said.  “I don’t even know at the moment how many jets my company has, I think we have six or seven.  We also have several helicopters.  We use them for many purposes – getting people around, or even delivering equipment when needed in emergencies.”

    “I had no idea.” Cheryl said.

    Carol Anne laid a hand gently on her daughter’s arm and said, “Misty, I haven’t told Cheryl much about you.  Although she does know you and I were cheerleaders in high school.  For example, I have not told her that you are among the wealthiest women in the world – and that your business is going to displace Microsoft probably within the next decade or sooner.  Or that you are working on things that really help people.”    

    “Why, thank you, Carol Anne!” I say. “I hope to soon fully interface the human brain to external machinery and through computer interfaces, help those with limb injuries walk or become functional in a way not yet accomplished!  But it reaches far beyound that.  Many of the things MDC does are classified, so I can't even speak to them, but new things are afoot.  I am trying to make a difference in the world!   As to Microsoft,  I think it may take most of the decade for the Microsoft takeover, but it will be taken over by MDC. Right now I am studying and exploring taking the company,MDC, “public,” an option I have resisted.   My company is on the verge of releasing details of some very significant advances in a number of fields. Even as supposedly “wealthy” as I am, I have committed assets, where most of them are sunken into MDC.  I do have substantial liquid assets, so I can acquire outright anything I need – or the company needs, but going public might flood more money into the operations where we can attack more quickly some of the nearly solved problems. I may keep majority holdings, but taking a company public would help enlarge the capabilities of products we are manufacturing as well as research into expanded better ones . . . “ I realized I was rambling and stopped.

    ”That said, if your family wants to come with me to Minnesota, you can.  I am planning on going to West Duluth, to be with my mother when Visitor arrives – and I am inviting you Cheryl, and your mom and dad, Carol Anne and Bill, and your grandmother, to join Fred and me at my mother’s house tomorrow.  However, I want you to have the option to do whatever you want to do . . .   Fred and I are going to my Minnesota Office, then on up to West Duluth, to see Mom.”

    I could see Carol Anne was a little surprised. This was an opportunity to see her mother, and it might be an important opportunity, so I continued,   “I know the Secret Service has a plan to get you back to Chama, and Fred and me to Texas, but what I want to do is to put one or the other jet at your disposal to fly back to Albuquerque, to Chama, or to go to wherever you want to go . . . or West Duluth, where your mother and Cheryl’s grandmother is . . .  to expand your options.  In fact, go anywhere you want!  Hawaii, or Alaska, or South America – anywhere.   And seriously. It is all on me. And I can afford it!  I want no arguments on that, Carol Anne.  I imposed on you at Chama, and you really and truly saved me from consuming myself!  And you introduced me to Fred!  And besides, the Chama Town Council will get along fine without you for as long as you want to be away . . .”

    Cheryl is really taking notice of what I’m saying. She smiles fully, looking almost like the beautiful blond high school cheerleader her mother was way back when.  She looks me right in the eye for a moment, smiles and asks, “Can we go to Australia . . ?”

    I can’t help it! I break into a involuntary laugh. “Cheryl!” I say, “ Of course, you can.  But it is up to your mom!  And Visitor will be here pretty soon.  It would be a good idea, or better idea, I think, to spend the time with your immediate family.  This is an important event in human history.  Maybe the most important event . . .  Who do you know in Australia?”

    “I’m not being serious,” Cheryl blushed. “It is just a guy I know through e-mail . . .”  

    “Sounds serious to me, the way you just blushed!  Those guys are the kind you have to watch out for,” I said. “If your mom wants to take you down there, down under, I might tag along.  I have an office and research facility in Sydney.”

    “Not now.” Carol Anne says. “A guy in Australia!  Cheryl, you need a boyfriend closer to home.  Or maybe it is better that he is so far away . . .”

    “Oh,  Mom!” Cheryl says.  

    “Look,” I say.  “If things don’t get too wild in the next few weeks, maybe we can all go down under.  But first we are going shopping, New York, Chicago, Washington, might take a week, maybe we could go to Paris . . .?” 

    Carol Anne says, “Now that sounds like fun!  But let me discuss this Minnesota possibility with Bill . . . Just a few minutes.” 

    I tell them both, “It is up to you, Carol Anne.  I really haven’t discussed it with Fred except last night I said that on the way back to Texas, I wanted to stop by my Minneapolis headquarters office to pick up some paper things I have stored in my safe.  I haven’t yet told him I want to go see Mom. I want to introduce him to my mother.  But, I will tell him, and if he wants to spend the time of this important event elsewhere, or somewhere without me, he can.  If so, we will get back together again soon, and it is not up to him where I go with this.  I know the situation is different in a marriage.” 

    Fred voiced no objections at all, but both of us are cell or wireless connected and are dealing with business considerations on the fly. After the National Academy of Sciences meeting, Fred was contacted to do some hydrogen fuel cell consulting involving his latest marketed product.  He promised to contact them when he returned to his lab in Texas.  I am dealing with a few questions on which direction I want my company to direct research resources.

    Bill Harrison is a pushover, and, of course, Carol Anne knows which buttons to push.  I suggested that we meet at my Mom’s place tomorrow late after noon and hold our own welcoming party, and barbeque.  In the end I called for only one of the two jets on standby to show up.  We met the flight crew at Dulles. 

    This MDC company jet we board for our trip to Minnesota is one of the new Gulfstream G750's Special Mission version, 2014 rollout, with larger fuel tanks, optimized wing surfaces, some of my software, and it will fly mach 0.81 to reach the global range of 13,000 statute miles, meaning this is the only private jet that can fly great circle routes anywhere, non-stop.  It can fly from pole to pole -- 12,450 miles.  It can fly mach 0.95, but range is in the 8,000 nautical mile range at that speed.  The passenger capacity for maximum range is eight and it full sleeps eight. Flight crew is nominally four, with two crew sleeper berths. The interior is my choice of design.

               

   Minneapolis-St. Paul International has 11,000,10,000 and two 8,000 foot long runways. Our Gulfstream G750 needs right at 6,200 feet for take-off. And 2000 ft more if you are operating out of Bolivia.  The smaller Jets we have are lighter and can operate out of more airports.  The only reason I know about this was in the initial purchasing decisions, especially for the G750.  

Image Credit: Duluth International Airport.

 

The runway in Duluth  is over 10,000 feet long.  The joke in the days when I was growing was that really small planes ran out of fuel after landing trying to make it to either fuel or the terminal.

The runway at Area 51 is a long one, but the longest practical runway I know of and have been upon was when I flew into Bolivia's J F Kennedy International, [The High]"El Alto," at La Paz, Bolivia. Once. And out.  Breathless. Elevation is 13,325 feet 4,061 m, runway is 13,135 ft. long, and I think my pilot used over 10,000 feet of it getting out.  I probably will avoid El Alto in the future.  It left me Breathless.  No kidding, I used oxygen most of the way to Rio.  I did interview and hire two American-educated exceptional Bolivian computer whiz-kids while there.  They would be the core of MDC in Bolivia.

         Fred and I got off at Minneapolis-St Paul International/Wold-Chamberlain Airport, and sent the Harrisons onward to West Duluth where I made sure they had a car waiting for them.  This was "home" to Carol Anne and to me.  More me than Carol Anne, since for Carol Anne it was Chama, New Mexico, now, and Bill Harrison.

        I know I'll be spending time in Texas, soon.  But other than Mom's place in West Duluth, I'm not sure where "my" home is going to become.  Maybe it will be Texas.  Part time.  Even Fred has a place in Colorado, cooler than the Davis Mounains. 

 That 50-inch Tinsley is one heck of a telescope, though.  And it is set up . . .already.

     In Minneapolis, Fred and I are met by one of my limousines and driven to my building.  It is still daylight enough to enjoy the dusk, but Fred and I are taken to the basement and my secure fast elevator takes us to the top floor.

    I started to go directly to my office safe, but Fred stopped to enjoy the view since my building is about 7 miles from downtown and the Minneapolis skyline looks good from here.  I grasped his arm and moved right up against him, virtually in full body contact. 

    “This is a beautiful view!” Fred said.  Then he surrounded me with his arms and pulled me closer.  The sky to the west is pinkish with the northern blue and it is cloud clear.  I know when that remnant of sunlight vanishes, and when Visitor rose, Visitor's brightness would dominate everything.  We stood together for a moment.

    “Fred.  I need you to pay special attention and bear with me while we gather some important documents I have in my safe.”

    I led him to the safe, in a nook on the backside of the coulmn of my private elevator.  Our presence illuminated the door and access panel.

    “Note the last time this safe was opened.” I say. “ Let me get an envelope for you to put these documents in.”

    I slip back to my desk, touch the supply drawer control panel fingerprint sensor and the supply drawer opens. I withdraw a manilla 10 x 13-inch clasp-type envelope with my company logo and return address on it. I also grab one of those advertising pens from the desk drawer.  These are good pens you can hang onto, and they are beautiful deepest ultramarine translucent you can imagine.  I step back and the drawer closes, and I return to my safe.

    “It reads that you last opened and closed it in on May 24, 2017, that’s just before you went to see the Harrisons,” Fred says. “Isn’t it?”

    “Indeed, it is.”  I say. I hand him the pen and the envelope. "Make a note of the time and date of last access on this envelope, front, back anywhere you want."

     "Okay." Fred says, writing the date and time from the safe readout.

     “I am going to open the safe," I say, "and I want you to reach inside and remove the items in there and place them in this envelope.  And seal it.” 

    When the door opens, a light inside illuminates the contents.  Fred sticks the pen in his shirt pocket, opens the envelope I handed him and reaches into the safe and collects Schyler’s letter and envelope, the letter and envelope to Baxter and the printout of the e-mail fragment from my crashed hard drive, and inserts them into the envelope and seals it.  Without my prompting, he pulls out the pen and notes today's date and time on the envelope.

    “Now what?” Fred asks. He looks the beautiful pen over, starts to hand it back to me.

    "It's yours," I say, "from me to you!" I have to laugh. "Stick it back in your pocket!"

    "Thanks.  That is a "good-feeling" pen!  Really. Who makes them?"

    "MDC does now, I liked the feel of those so much I bought the company.  I have to tell you "everybody" loves the feel of those pens!  It is good advertising. . . But they really are a pleasure to use."

    "You amaze me," Fred says, "What is all this cloak and dagger top secret treatment for these?"  He waves the envelope in the air.

     His beautiful bright luminous blue eyes turn penetrating, so I had to tell him what I was starting to realize.

    “Those are perhaps the most important documents on the face of the Earth,” I say. “So I want you to secure them until we return to your ranch in Texas, where we will together open the envelope and you will learn what is in there.  I know it will interest you.”

    “Is it scary stuff?”  Fred asks.

    I’m actually afraid to just come out and say it.  I close my eyes, exhale.  I reach for Fred’s hand, still leaving my eyes closed.   When he grasps my hand I say, “It scares me.  More than that.  It terrifies me.”   
 
    “Oh, Misty.” Fred says.   “I can’t even imagine anything you could be afraid of.”

    Fred pulled me closer surrounded me with his arms. I nestled against his shoulder and neck, returned his embrace.  His warmth made me feel better.  I step back. “Thanks.  But there are things that scare me incredibly.”

    “Will we talk about them?” Fred asks. “Or keep them hidden?”

    “In good time,” I say. “In good time, and soon, you will know everything;  possibly more than you want to know. . .”
               
    “I want to know everything, Misty.”

    “I promise you will.”  I turn toward my desk again.  I touch a part of the desktop.

     “While we’re here in this office, I need to set some things in motion.” I say.  “You probably know I manufacture large scale and large capacity memories, and sell them – and in addition to dynamic types of  memory, and spin memory, we are making nearly nano-scale cubic crystal storage devices, incredibly dense, incredibly fast, incredibly durable.

    “I need to be sure we have enough to do what I have in mind.  I want to record every part of the spectrum that we can record when Visitor arrives.  I want to be sure we can capture everything, even subcarrier information if it is there.  I am so certain Visitor is going to communicate, but I have no idea how.  So . . .  every option I presently have, or can acquire,  must be used.”

    “I need to alert every office,  and every facility, I own on the planet, to suspend new memory sales and, of course, only deliver what has been contracted to date, and to resume at some later time -- until I am satisfied we have recorded  everything we can from what they, Visitor,  might bring.   Their “communication” to us with light might be a hint as to their preferred method . . . But I want to catch everything!   I want this mandate sent to all offices.  All of them.”

    A few seconds later, my desk printer issues a letter from the statements I just made.

    I handed it to Fred.  He read it. “Your software does this?  Wow.”

    “That is why you and Bill need to get on board with me!  This package is called  My Executive Assistant.” 
   
-----------------------

    Fred and I did the Bar B Que thing.  Fred makes a world class Chili Bar B Que Burger. 

    I'm actually a gourmet-type cook, an art of necessity, since I have been single so long the need to vary my diet and exercise despite a lot of hands-on-research forced me to learn how to create tasty attractive foods that I could fool myself into eating.   For the Visitor Welcoming Barbeque, I had to make a potato salad.  Pretty standard stuff.  But I decided on a dessert of "epic" character.  I enlisted Cheryl to obtain and cut black liquorice sticks into " feathers,"and with Cheryl's imaginitive help, sculptured some dark chocolate appropriately, and trimmed it, hid it in the chest freezer as a "Crow" to serve to Bill.  Each of us could have a bit of it.

    Cheryl enjoyed participating in the joke preparation for her father.

    I signaled her to bring it out, and as she carried it to place on the table near her father.   Fred, who did not know what we had done spotted it and kind of nearly spoiled the joke by getting it so quickly and laughing almost uncontrollably.

   I said, "Bill.  You know, srictly speaking, you do not have to eat this."  

   Bill saw the Crow confection and was laughing at Fred's laughing and said, "Fred, I'm splitting this down the middle, half for you!"

   "Touche," Bill pointed at me."I do deserve it for the sake of my hubris affliction.  But I will be glad to share it, Misty!"

   This particular crow was tasty, sweet, and appreciated.

 

The Harrison’s, and Carol Anne’s mother,  Mary Jorgensen, my mother Clara, and Fred, and I – are all seated on the terrace of Mom’s old farm house. This time of year in all the northern states daylight is appropriately extended.  We visit. Mom likes Fred, I can tell.  It seems to be mutual.  But Mom would like any guy I brought to meet her.  This is a first since high school.

    As darkness approaches, I solicit help from Fred and Bill, and we wrestle my old, old, old  Criterion 6-inch Newtonian F8 on an equatorial mount up the stairs from mom’s basement and place it on the edge of the terrace with a power cord running to the old clock drive.  It had been my father’s telescope. Dad had given it to me when he and mom split in 1990.  He was killed in a car accident the year after I graduated from college.  He was absent from most of my life. 

     "These “Criterion Mirrors” were better than 1/16-th wave, most of them ” Bill Harrison said.  “Have you ever tested this one, Misty?”

      "Not really"  I said.  "But try Epsilon Lyrae,  Say at 400X. It will show some diffraction rings."

     Bill looks at Fred.  “Hey, she knows her way around the sky.”

    “Shucks.  I just always say that to impress the guys.  Of course I know a little of my way around the sky."
    
    “She is full of surprises!” Fred nods.

    The famous double-double is easy, and the diffraction rings showed up hard and round.  The eyepiece is a good one at 3 mm. focal length. My father told me that 3mm eyepiece had cost $700, so it better be good. I’d done Epsilon Lyrae before.  I just did not realize how good the mirror was.

    “Way better than a sixteenth wave, Bill.  This is a real collector’s treasure.”  Fred tells us.   Fred had aligned the polar axis with the real pole very close to but not exactly on the star Polaris.  And he did it so quickly, you could tell he had done star party setups by the hundred, while he and Bill marketed their book.   At 400X Epsilon Lyrae, the north one, stayed in the field for 5 minutes.  

    Visitor, still coming at magnitude -17,  rises as the Earth turns.    As the nearly vanished sunlight in northern Minnesota waned, Visitor’s light grew to dominate the sky. We watched.
   
Arrival

    Visitor reaches Earth vicinity on the night side.  Some 57 times brighter than the full moon, Visitor enters into an orbit around Earth that is slightly inclined to the equator and in three minutes dims from -17th magnitude to no light emanations at all.

 
    Visitor becomes a perfect sphere, a perfect reflector.  More than a billion people, faces turned to the sky for visitors arrival, watch Visitor make the transition from brilliance to darkness.  From Earth’s surface, the fading of Visitor is startling; from bright white disk to “space-black” eightball, void of any color or light, invisible, but for reflections from its surface, and the background stars it occluded.  Visitor becomes a moving, orbiting,  mostly black-as-space-looking sphere, blocking out the stars and space behind it.  As it orbits, the covered stars disappear but flash back into view as Visitor’s slow movement uncovers them.

    Visitor appears to be a spherical mirror-like orb exactly 1500 kilometers in diameter.
 
    Since Visitor enters orbit on the night side of Earth, it reflects the Earth as a tiny crescent precisely at the center of Visitor’s black disk.  The Sun, far beyond the Earth, becomes  a  most brilliant highlight to the side of the Earth’s reflection, and the Moon’s tiny distorted reflection is most of the way to the edge of Visitor’s black disk, a faint tiny shine on Visitor’s edge.

    Through a modest  telescope,  looking at the center of Visitor’s black disk, one can see in reflection the shape of the Earth’s landmasses and populated coastal areas.   Human metropolitan nighttime lighting outlines the continental shores.

    However, the most striking feature of Visitor’s reflection is the dark blackness of space; the lack of light reflected from anything but the highlight of the Sun, the tiny lunar reflection, and the crescent of Earth with its tiny night-bright cities.

    Other than those reflections, Visitor appears as an incredibly black spherical orb.   It takes a large telescope to see the other sunlit planets, Venus and Mercury, and the  distant stars behind Earth and Sun on the perfect-reflector-surface of Visitor. 

    Visitor orbits Earth at nearly three times geosynchronous distance, an orbit with which Visitor would circumnavigate the Earth in five days.  At that distance, Visitor appears slightly larger than Earth’s moon.  No mass value can be determined.  There are no perturbations detected in the orbits of man-made earth-orbiting satellites.
 
    After Visitor’s luminance drops to zero, exactly one hour passes.  Then, Visitor speaks in many tongues.

    Visitor speaks in all major languages of Earth, and in as many minor languages as were ever broadcast to space via radio . . .   Visitor speaks in English, Mandarin, Putonghua, Cantonese,  Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Farsi, Dari, Belorussian, Malay, Indonesian, Bantu, Wu, Malayalam, Korean, Turkish, Vietnamese, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Italian, Min Nan, Jinyu, Gugerati, Polish, Ukrainian, Zulu, Afrikaans, Swedish, Norwegian, Apache, Sioux, Ute,  Basque . . . clearly an attempt to reach as many humans as possible.

     Simultaneously, Visitor speaks with images. 

    Visitor commandeers all public radio frequencies worldwide and employs them to speak.

    Visitor’s “voice” is neuter, is pitched at a frequency to be neither masculine nor feminine; but tonally clear and perfectly inflected in each of the languages.
 
   

    Visitor appropriates all publicly broadcast television frequencies and bandwidths.  All commercial and network television channels are controlled and used by Visitor to send its message.  None of Visitor’s signals can be interrupted, or jammed, or stopped. If power is shut off, power to operate the transmitter comes from somewhere else. On all the public channels, Visitors message and images can not be shut off.
 
    The images Visitor transmits practically bring to a stop all human work on all continents.  The images capture mankind’s attention.

    For television the voice of Visitor is incidental.  Audio and text of the languages being spoken are transmitted.  The clear, sexless voice reads words that scroll horizontally on the bottom of the video frame for some languages, or  vertically along one side, for other languages.  The television image content lay in the images.  The message itself, becomes a background mantra, and is not related to the images that appear.

    The first television image broadcast world wide is clearly a view from space of the rapid approach to a yellow star and then to one of the planet’s orbiting the star. This orbiting planet has a large satellite about a quarter the planet’s diameter.  The viewpoint swings to view the blue world with its satellite.  This world has white polar ice caps.  As the viewpoint comes closer to the world hanging in space, the night side of the world glows with points of light and these city glows outline continents.  It is clear that the continents are those of Earth, and that the sequence of images are probably those made as Visitor approached Earth.  The unique weather patterns and cloud formations on the surface were those patterns of earlier in the day of Visitor’s arrival.
  
    Although Visitor settles into Earth orbit, the image viewpoint does not. 

    The viewpoint descends through the atmosphere toward the Earth’s surface.

The United States’ Eastern seaboard is rapidly traversed from Florida to Maine in what appears to be a high-altitude flyover.  The viewpoint then shifts to travel west across the United States, across cities and rivers and the great plains and zooms toward Colorado’s Pikes Peak.  As it approaches  the summit of Pikes Peak, automobiles and people are resolved, and near the concession stand at the mountain’s top, one person looking eastward is seen.  The viewpoint zooms toward the person gazing east focusing on the face of a young girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.  When her face fills the screen, the viewpoint approaches one of her eyes, one of her eyes pupils, and enlarges it until it is like diving through the reflection of the world on her eye into a black depth.   In the blackness a point of white expands, becomes African lions and peoples,  giraffes and elephants, chimpanzees, baboons, lemurs, dogs, wolves then polar bears and walrus and Siberian tigers, and then fish swimming, tuna, sharks, mollusks, squid, octopuses, whales, killer whales and dolphins.

The television images view splits into multiple frames; an array of four frames by four frames, with each frame depicting Earth’s animals and peoples, and plants.  Microscopic organisms are also displayed, along with plants, birds, and animals  from Earth’s rainforests and ocean depths.  There are many animals displayed, and many people. 

    The frames divide and quadruple in number from sixteen to sixty-four frames per television screen, and then again after a few seconds, each frame with animals or living things again quadruple, until the images become objects too small to recognize, yet are  apparently images of the many living things on Earth.  And again the images quadruple, until the high definition television frame is filled with at least 4096 small frames, then all frames are shrinking, becoming, finally,  a white dot which recedes, until the viewpoint leaps out from the pupil and face of the blond-haired blue-eyed young girl atop Pikes Peak, again showing her face.   The viewpoint holds the face of the girl for several seconds backing away, then tilts to look downward at the girl and then swings westward over the summit, gaining altitude and speeding across the Earth’s surface heading at very high velocity first to San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, then to Hong Kong.  There it stops and rises higher and swings the viewpoint to catch a glimpse of the Moon and bright Visitor nearing the time it would settle into orbit.  Then the world’s television screens fade to black as the first speaking of the message ends.

    The message repeats.

    The images do not repeat.

    What follows those images of approaching Earth and its life forms, are more images, images incredibly sharp, vivid, and detailed. They are images of alien worlds.

    Many stars similar to the Sun are approached and their worlds examined.  Some stars are yellow but many are orange, and some are verging to the red.  Only a few stars with planets are low-mass red stars.  Worlds unlike the Earth dance across high-definition television screens worldwide.  Many systems of alien suns and planets or multiple suns with planetary worlds are imaged.  Some visages look almost familiar, but there are always subtle differences from truly familiar scenes.  There are vast ocean planets with but small numbers of islands, as well as planets with immense land areas and seas, or planets with numerous huge islands.  There are quick glimpses of many living beings on the many planets imaged.

    On one world there are waterfalls that fall kilometers; rivers so vast and tumultuous that they have to be views of a young or geologically very active world;  on another world huge planet-covering forests show nearly familiar looking trees and vegetation.   On one planet, verdant and blue, gigantic waterfalls and gigantic trees are both extant.  There were glimpses of vast regions appearing to be some kind of cities; there were worlds where individually huge buildings are scattered across otherwise naturally appearing surface landscapes apparently substituted for cities; many images contain things that appear to be alive and moving vigorously; some languorously.   Some animated images are of huge delicate looking space-faring ships obviously drifting freely in space far from any stars, visited by spaceships almost like swarms of gnats, or fireflies.
 
    It takes Visitor’s relaxed clear voice exactly three minutes and twenty-five seconds to complete each cycle of speaking the message.   After a five-second silence and a television image fade-to-black, the same message  repeats.  With each beginning of the message, images of a new world or scene in space appears, and the voice and text message repeats.

    Most of the images of new planets or systems begin by a space borne world approaching viewpoint. In each view of a planetary world, the new world is approached from space with the viewpoint moving steadily into the atmosphere and toward the surface of the world.

    Every three minutes and 30 seconds, a new and different image of a life-inhabited world or a manufactured island in space appears.  A new world every 210 seconds.  There are images of worlds of practically every color of the spectrum, stunning in their variety – with water and water clouds or ice  probably the main common planetary surface feature.   The amounts of liquid water appearing vary from nearly desert worlds to worlds of islands and beaches and worlds with huge quantities of global ice.  Some ice worlds and some desert worlds alike have small amounts of liquid water on their surfaces.  On icy desert worlds some planets were girdled with narrow equatorial swaths of green and blue. On dry hot desert worlds, the green and blue areas were at the poles.
   
    The general message is broadcast and rebroadcast for five days, repeated in all prominent and many lesser languages of Earth.  Every time the message is completed, images of a new world would begin; never is a scene repeated.  Humans beings are entranced by Visitor’s spectacular images.   Human work suffered because every one who could see the images watched the images.  There were no breaks in the five day visage of thousands of new worlds. 

The Message . . .

    Greetings.

    This will be a one-way communication.

    We will transmit.

    We are an assemblage of beings from many worlds in this galaxy.   We engage Life-bearing worlds, worlds that were long ago seeded with Life. This Life-filled world  is such a world.

     We are tenders of worlds.  We are gardeners. 

    We note you have not yet discovered your Purpose, or the Purpose of Life.   Indeed, Life has a Purpose!  Life has a message!

     Nothing in the Universe is so precious as Life.  Life’s promise is the most important reason there is to cross the gulf between stars.

   
     The Message of Life and its Purpose is before you and within you; study it, learn from it, understand it.

    Those who seeded this world long ago vanished from this Galaxy, indeed, from this Universe.  We did not meet them; we emerged much later as their children.  You, too, are one of their children -- along with the multitude of other Life forms with which you share this world.

    This world, this Earth –  you think of as belonging to you. It does not. You simply emerged here. You belong to this world.  Though the Seeders are gone, this world has not been abandoned.

    In their place,  we are now Life’s tenders.

    We nurture Life where  possible.  We ensure that Life’s purpose is neither threatened nor damaged.  We weed and prune the threads of Life as needed. We sometimes eliminate a thread of Life to allow other threads to flower.

    We have studied you.

    We have many times observed the successful emergence of Life forms similar to you.  We have also witnessed devastating failures orchestrated by Life forms similar to you.  This gave us pause. 
   

    You beings are NOT the only Lifework of this planet with immense potential.   Many  other Life forms on this world are promising and of great interest to us, and to the service of Life’s Purpose.  Your thread of Life concerns and troubles us.  It took time to reach consensus.

    The Life forms of  great interest to us, as well as all other Life forms on this planet, are threatened by your short-sighted exponential population growth.   The major threat to this world’s other Life forms are a result of your defective grasp of Life’s Nature, and Purpose.  You will control your population. 

    Know this with certainty:  You will not be allowed to continue to interfere with the destiny of  the other Life forms on this world.   We are disturbed with what your thread of Life has done to the other Life forms on this planet.   We are concerned that a thread of such promise has become so malignant.  We have examined the program running within you, and know it has flexible potential; it is not constrained.

   
    We do not state this casually:  You interfere with Life’s Purpose.

   
    You threaten the integrity of its message.
   

    You have placed yourselves on the edge of termination – for cause.  
   

    Know that it is within your power to change your behavior.  We have hope for you. 

    But if your behavior does not change, your thread of Life will be extinguished!

    You will conserve and protect this world so that other Life forms with which you share it can continue to exist and evolve to reach their potential.  You will  preserve this planet and the vast array of Life upon it.
   

    You have 50 of your years to begin solving the problem outlined here. You may not think that time enough, but that is all the time you have.  If you have not been able to make true progress in that amount of time, we know other Life forms on this planet will do better.
   

    You are warned!
   

    We will return . . . and we will judge.
   

    Use these 50 years wisely.

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