Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? by Eugene Linn Page A

daunting.
    “Here’s a memo for you. They want you to get inside the aliens’ heads and tell the Council why they’re doin’ what they’re doin’.”
    “Oh lord,” said Claire.
    “You’d better head up to the Squirrel Cage and keep up with the D9 messages,” Blake said. “Ahmet will connect you with the people you need to talk to for your NSC meeting.”
    When she arrived, Claire found that the inner walls in some of the Language Unit offices had been knocked out overnight, to create a large working area. Ahmet and his colleagues stood or sat around a large table in the middle of the room. Some of them handled long sticks with a small, horizontal board on the far end, like rakes. They pushed and pulled pieces ofpaper with words written on them around to various countries represented on the surface of the table. The scraps contained the English meaning of words translated from one of the aliens’ messages in a particular language. The hope was that if the fertile minds in the Language Unit saw the big picture, a new understanding might click.
    “Hey, Claire, how’re you doing?” Ahmet asked with a big smile. “Guess what, we’re making progress!”
    By progress, Ahmet meant the specialists thought they had figured out some of the words in the two D9 messages that had been sent. But they still couldn’t figure out what the aliens were saying. The work was a global effort, as D9 sent messages in three dozen different written languages. The first translations were little more than guesses, with many of the translations apparently a random jumble of symbols. There seemed to be a thick lens between the aliens and humans that distorted communications.
    In the first message, one of the words spelled out “uracf” in English. Nothing in the rest of the English-language text seemed to give a clue to the meaning. But computer programs and the busy minds of code breakers examined each word in the thirty-six languages of the messages, to come up with every possible meaning. In this case, Portuguese and Chinese revealed words that could mean “surface.” The likelihood of that meaning for each of the three words, taken together, was enough to convince Ahmet and other experts that there was more than a 50-50 chance those three words meant “surface.” The Chinese found that their ideographic characters seemed especially useful for representing nouns. The word “round” popped up when it was spelled in full in Tagalog, the primary Filipino dialect, and partially spelled in three other languages. There were no good matches on the other forty-six words in the first message.
    “So now we got ‘round’ and ‘surface’ in the first message, and ‘fifty-three,’ ‘down,’ and ‘knife’ in the second one,” Ahmet said.
    “Knife?” asked Claire.
    “Well, any of the words could be changed. It might just have something to do with the idea of ‘sharp,’ or the concept of a weapon.”
    Claire had noticed a small woman in her late thirties, with a big smile on her face, standing beside Ahmet during his explanation.
    “Hi, I’m Cindy,” the woman said, sticking her hand out to Claire.
    “That’s Cindy,” Ahmet said with a laugh as he introduced the two women. “She’s the main person you need to see for your meeting.” The two women already knew of each other. Cindy Ricci was familiar with Claire’s name before D9, partly because they had both worked at the SETI Institute, and heard a lot about her after CSS discovered the spacecraft. Cindy, an anthropologist, was well known in the NASA community for her groundbreaking work at the Institute on possible paths for evolution of intelligent life outside the solar system. Which was why she’d been called in now.
    Ahmet said, “She’s kind of about making friends with the space people and getting to know them personally. Show us pictures of their kids and stuff.”
    “Doesn’t that sound like fun?” asked Cindy.
    “It sure does,” said Claire, taking