to learn their language, is that it?"
"It's hard to say. "
"Perhaps the aliens would be more comfortable meeting with an advance man from one of our ethnic minorities," the White House man said. "Anyway, it's a possibility. Think about it. "
Norman promised he would think about it.
The Pentagon liaison, a Major General, took him to lunch and over coffee casually asked, "What sorts of armaments do you see these aliens having?"
"I'm not sure," Norman said.
"Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? And what about their vulnerabilities? I mean, the aliens might not even be human at all. "
"No, they might not. "
"They might be like giant insects. Your insects can withstand a lot of radiation. "
"Yes," Norman said.
"We might not be able to touch these aliens," the Pentagon man said gloomily. Then he brightened. "But I doubt they could withstand a direct hit with a multimeg nuclear device, do you?"
"No," Norman said. "I don't think they could. " "It'd vaporize 'em. "
"Sure. "
"Laws of physics. "
"Right. "
"Your report must make that point clearly. About the nuclear vulnerability of these aliens. "
"Yes," Norman said.
"We don't want to start a panic," the Pentagon man said. "No sense getting everyone upset, is there? I know the JCS will be reassured to hear the aliens are vulnerable to our nuclear weapons. "
"I'll keep that in mind," Norman said.
Eventually, the meetings ended, and he was left to write his report. And as he reviewed the published speculations on extraterrestrial life, he decided that the Major General from the Pentagon was not so wrong, after all. The real question about alien contact - if there was any real question at all - concerned panic. Psychological panic. The only important human experience with extraterrestrials had been Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds. " And the human response was unequivocal. People had been terrified.
Norman submitted his report, entitled "Contact with Possible Extraterrestrial Life. " It was returned to him by the NSC with the suggestion that the title be revised to "sound more technical" and that he remove "any suggestion that alien contact was only a possibility, as alien contact is considered virtually certain in some quarters of the Administration. "
Revised, Norman's paper was duly classified Top Secret, under the title "Recommendations for the Human Contact Team to Interact with Unknown Life Forms (ULF). " As Norman envisioned it, the ULF Contact Team demanded particularly stable individuals. In his report he had said
"I wonder," Barnes said, opening a folder, "if you recognize this quote:
Contact teams meeting an Unknown Life Form (ULF) must be prepared for severe psychological impact. Extreme anxiety responses will almost certainly occur. The personality traits of individuals who can withstand extreme anxiety must be determined, and such individuals selected to comprise the team.
Anxiety when confronted by unknown life has not been sufficiently appreciated. The fears unleashed by contact with a new life form are not understood and cannot be entirely predicted in advance. But the most likely consequence of contact is absolute terror. "
Barnes snapped the folder shut. "You remember who said that?"
"Yes," Norman said. "I do. "
And he remembered why he had said it.
As part of the NSC grant, Norman had conducted studies of group dynamics in contexts of psychosocial anxiety. Following the procedures of Asch and Milgram, he constructed several environments in which subjects did not know they were being tested. In one case, a group of subjects were told to take an elevator to another floor to participate in a test. The elevator jammed between floors. Subjects were then observed by hidden video camera.
There were several variations to this. Sometimes the elevator was marked "Under Repair"; sometimes there was telephone communication with the "repairman," sometimes not; sometimes the ceiling fell in, and the lights went out; and sometimes the floor of the elevator was constructed of clear lucite.
In another case, subjects were loaded into a van and driven out into the desert by an "experiment leader" who ran out of gas, and then suffered a "heart attack," thus stranding the subjects.
In the most severe version, subjects were taken up in a private plane, and the pilot suffered a "heart attack" in mid-air. Despite the traditional complaints about such tests - that they were sadistic, that they were artificial, that subjects somehow sensed the situations were contrived - Johnson gained considerable information about groups under anxiety stress.
He found that fear responses were minimized when the group was small (five or less); when group members knew each other well; when group members could see each other and were not isolated; when they shared defined group goals and fixed time limits; when groups were mixed age and mixed gender; and when group members had high phobic-tolerant personalities as measured by LAS tests for anxiety, which in turn correlated with athletic fitness.
Study results were formulated in dense statistical tables, although, in essence, Norman knew he had merely verified common sense: if you were trapped in an elevator, it was better to be with a few relaxed, athletic people you knew, to keep the lights on, and to know someone was working to get you free.
Yet Norman knew that some of his results were counterintuitive, such as the importance of group composition. Groups composed entirely of men or entirely of women were much poorer at handling stress than mixed groups; groups composed of individuals roughly the same age were much poorer than groups of mixed age. And pre-existing groups formed for another purpose did worst of all; at one point he had stressed a championship basketball team, and it cracked almost immediately.
Although his research was good, Norman remained uneasy about the underlying purposes for his paper - alien invasion - which he personally considered speculative to the point of absurdity. He was embarrassed to submit his paper, particularly after he had rewritten it to make it seem more significant than he knew it was.
He was relieved when the Carter Administration did not like his report. None of Norman's recommendations were approved. The Administration did not agree with Dr. Norman Johnson that fear was a problem; they thought the predominant human emotion would be wonder and awe. Furthermore, the Administration preferred a large contact team of thirty people, including three theologians, a lawyer, a physician, a representative from the State Department, a representative from the Joint Chiefs, a select group from the legislative branch, an aerospace engineer, an exobiologist, a nuclear physicist, a cultural anthropologist, and a television anchor personality.
In any case, President Carter was not re-elected in 1980, and Norman heard nothing further about his ULF proposal. He had heard nothing for six years.
Until now.
Barnes said, "You remember the ULF team you proposed?"
"Of course," Norman said.
Norman had recommended a ULF team of four - an astrophysicist, a zoologist, a mathematician, a linguist - and a fifth member, a psychologist, whose job would be to monitor the behavior and attitude of the working team members.
"Give me your opinion of this," Barnes said. He handed Norman a sheet of paper:
ANOMALY INVESTIGATION TEAM
USN STAFF/SUPPORT MEMBERS
1. Harold C. Barnes, USN Project Commander Captain
2. Jane Edmunds, USN Data Processing Tech P. O. 1C
3. Tina Chan, USN Electronics Tech P. O. 1C
4. Alice Fletcher, USN Deepsat Habitat Support Chief P. O.
5. Rose C. Levy, USN Deepsat Habitat Support 2C
CIVILIAN STAFF MEMBERS
1. Theodore Fielding, astrophysicist/planetary geologist
2. Elizabeth Halpern, zoologist/biochemist
3. Harold J. Adams, mathematician/logician
4. Arthur Levine, marine biologist/biochemist
5. Norman Johnson,
psychologist
Norman looked at the list. "Except for Levine, this is the civilian ULF Team I originally proposed. I even interviewed them, and tested them, back then. "
"Correct. "
"But you said yourself: there are probably no survivors. There's probably no life inside that spacecraft. "
"Yes," Barnes said. "But what if I'm wrong?"