Neil Goble
Master of none
Freddy the Fish glanced at the folded newspaper beside him on the bench. A little one-column headline caught his eye:
MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM OUTER SPACE
"Probably from Cygnus," he said.
Freddy mashed a peanut, popped the meat into his mouth, and tossed the shell to the curb in front of his bench. He munched and idly watched two sparrows arguing over the discarded delicacy; the victor flitted to the head of a statue, let go a triumphant dropping onto the marble nose, and hopped to a nearby branch.
"Serves him right," Freddy said. He yawned and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Not yet long enough for scissors, he decided. He pulled his feet up on the bench, twisting in an effort to get comfortable. The sun was in his eyes, so he reclaimed the discarded newspaper and spread it over his face. His eyes momentarily focused on MYSTERIOUS SIGNALS FROM OUTER SPACE, right over his nose.
"Sure, Cygnus," he muttered, and closed his eyes and dropped off to sleep.
When he was awakened, it was by an excited hand shaking his shoulder and a panting, "Freddy! Freddy! Lookit the Extra just came out!"
Freddy slowly sat up, ascertained the identity of the intruder and the fact that the sun was setting, and said "Good evening, Willy. Please stop rattling that paper in my face."
"But just read it, Freddy," Willy shrieked, waving the paper so frantically that Freddy couldn't make out the big black headline. "'Positive contact from another planet,' the guy was yellin'. They put out an Extra so I snitched one from the boy. Read it to me, huh, Freddy? I'm dyin' o' curious."
"So give it here and I'll read it for you. Quit shakin' it or you'll tear it all up," Freddy snorted.
"Read it to me, huh, Freddy," Willy said, handing over the paper. "I don't know no one else that reads so good."
Freddy studied the headline and the first paragraph silently, then whistled lightly and lowered the paper.
"Y'know, Willy," he said, "the last thing I read before I dropped off a while ago was about these signals. But the funny thing is, I'd just assumed they were from Cygnus."
"What's a Cygnus, Freddy?" Willy asked, still pop-eyed. "A smoke? A dame? Or you mean like from Hunger?"
"Cygnus, my boy," Freddy explained patronizingly, "is a constellation within which there are two colliding galaxies. These colliding galaxies produce the most powerful electromagnetic radiations in the universe—an undecillion watts!"
"What's an undecillion?"
"An undecillion is ten raised to the 36th power," Freddy sighed, fearing that he wasn't getting through to Willy.
"No foolin'? What's a watt ... aw, you're pullin' my leg again, Freddy, talkin' riddles. Where'd ya ever learn to talk that way anyhow!"
"Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Georgia Tech, Oklahoma. Picked up a little here, a little there," Freddy said, reflecting on his indiscriminate past.
"Aw, cut it out, Freddy! C'mon, read it to me. Betcha can't! Where'd ya say it was from? Cygnus?"
"Not Cygnus. Ganymede." Freddy cleared his throat and rattled the newspaper authoritatively. "Washington: White House sources declared today that intelligent beings on a Jupiter moon have contacted the United States government. While the contents of the message have been made secret, the White House emphasized the message was friendly."
Freddy continued, "The signals, which were intercepted yesterday, were decoded this morning by a team of government scientists and cryptographers who had been at the task all night. While officials were noncommittal about the nature of the message contained in the signals, they declared 'We are authorized to state that the received message was friendly and appears to represent a sincere attempt by another race of intelligent beings to contact the people of Earth. A reply message is being formulated.' Officials further explained that the possibility of the signal's being a hoax has been thoroughly investigated and that there is no doubt whatsoever that the message is a genuine interspatial communication from intelligent beings on Ganymede. Ganymede is one of twelve moons of the planet Jupiter, and is larger than the planet Mercury."
Freddy stopped.
"Ain't there any more?" Willy whined.
"The rest of it is about how far away Ganymede is, and its relative density and mass and stuff. You wouldn't be interested, Willy."
"Oh. I guess not." Willy helped himself to a peanut. "What's it mean, Freddy?"
"Nothing much, Willy. Just that there's people somewhere besides here on Earth, and they called us on the phone."
"Whadd'ya know about that!" Willy gasped. "I didn't even know they was other people!" He stared with disbelief at the paper.
"I don't suppose anyone knew."
"How d'ya suppose they knew?" Willy asked. "I mean, that we was here, if we didn't know they was there?"
"I've been wondering about that, Willy. You know that last rocket we shot?"
"From Cape Carnival you mean?"
"Yeh. It was supposed to go into orbit around Jupiter. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe it didn't land on Ganymede; the people there could have examined it, figured out where it came from, and then radioed us on the same frequency the rocket transmitter used. Paper doesn't say that, of course, but it's a reasonable hypothesis."
"Freddy, I think you must be a genius or sumpin'."
Freddy smiled and stretched out to sleep again as Willy wandered off, staring blankly at the newspaper.
Carlton Jones, America's Number One personnel specialist, scowled at the pamphlet on his desk.
SECRET, it said in big red letters across the top and bottom. Special Instructions for Operation Space Case, said the smaller letters across the middle of the top sheet.
"Now I ask you, Dwindle," Jones said to his clerkish aide, "where, in this worldful of specialists, am I going to find someone with a well-rounded education? Much less one who'll take a chance on a flier like this?"
"Gosh, Mr. Jones, I just wouldn't know," Dwindle blinked. "Have you tried looking through your files?"
"Have I tried looking through my files," Jones sighed, looking at the ceiling light. "Dwindle, my files include every gainfully employed person in the United States of America and its possessions. Millions of them. One doesn't just browse through the files looking for things."
"Oh," Dwindle said. "I'm kinda new at this specialty," he explained.
"Yes, Dwindle. However," Jones continued, "one does make IBM runouts to find things."
"Hey, that's great!" Dwindle said, brightening. "Why don't you try making an IBM runout?"
"I did, Dwindle. Please let me finish? Our instructions call for finding a person with a well-rounded education. More specifically, a person who is capable of intelligently discussing and explaining some two dozen major 'fields of knowledge.' Plus, of course, at least a passing acquaintance with some one or two hundred minor fields of knowledge.
"So I set Mathematics into the IBM sorter. Mathematics is one of the major fields of knowledge, you see."
"Yeh," Dwindle acknowledged.
"So I took the few million mathematicians' cards which I got—good mathematicians and bad mathematicians, but at least people who can get their decimals in the right place. I set the IBM sorter for Biology, and ran the mathematicians' cards through. So I got several thousand mathematician-biologists."