Contact across the Solar System

Orthon of Venus

Orthon was relaxing in a sofa in the lounge of a spaceship, relaxing before his big day tomorrow. He was a somewhat slight, young-looking man with long blond hair, gray-green eyes, and bronzed or tanned-looking skin. He was wearing a fancy loose shirt, loose pants, and sandals. Sitting with him were two friends of his, two of the ship's pilots, Kalna and Ilmuth. Kalna was somewhat petite, and she had shoulder-length blond hair, golden eyes, and fair skin. Ilmuth had a more typical height, and she had shoulder-length black hair, dark brown eyes, and skin more like Orthon's. Both women were wearing ankle-length, flowing pastel-colored dresses with contrasting-colored jeweled belts, and also metallic-looking sandals. Kalna, like Orthon, came from planet Venus, while Ilmuth came from planet Mars. Orthon and Kalna were good fits to a later Earther stereotype of "Nordic aliens", while Ilmuth looked rather Mediterranean or Middle Eastern or a bit South Asian.

In front of them was a clear glass or plastic table, and on that table were a dendritic-crystal mini-tree and a potted plant with light-green streaks on its leaves. But unlike on Earth at the time, the table had no ashtrays on it, and neither did any other table in the ship. Elsewhere in the room were some more similarly-dressed ship crewpeople, along with some of both sexes in jumpsuits. Several of them had what looked like smartphones and laptop computers.

Among them was a maintenance robot that looked like a trashcan on wheels, but with mechanical arms, cameras, antennas, and other such things on it.

Their ship, the Aurora, was named after the beautiful lights that sometimes appear in some planets' atmospheres. It was a long, tapered cylinder roughly the size of a big aircraft carrier, and it worked much the same way, carrying smaller vehicles. It was currently in the stratosphere above the Gulf of California, south of the US state with that name. Its active camouflage made it look like the sky around it to people on the surface.

Orthon, Kalna, Ilmuth, and the rest of the Aurora's crew had a big day up ahead. Orthon was to make contact with an Earther, a certain George Adamski, and reveal the existence of the Solar System Community to the Earthers for the first time in a long time. The SSC was also known as the Community of the Worlds or simply The Worlds. It was a loose confederation of humanity's numerous Solar-System colonies, a confederation that grew over the centuries, and that now included all of them. Many people traveled between the SSC worlds, knitting them together as one great community, and many of the worlds' spaceships had crews from several worlds, spaceships like the Aurora.

Orthon was also to reveal to George his reason for starting contact now: the Earthers' major nations' building large numbers of nuclear bombs, despite seeing what devastation they cause. An all-out war with these weapons would devastate the Earthers' cities and set back Earther civilization for decades if not centuries or millennia. The Earthers had recently demonstrated a willingness to fight greatly destructive wars, wars that they called World Wars I and II, and a war with nuclear bombs could only be worse. The people of the SSC had mixed feelings about the Earth and its people, but they often viewed the Earthers as one would view a wayward member of one's family -- a member who is often immature and dangerous, but a family member nonetheless, and one whom they hope to be reconciled with someday. So the Earthers building large numbers of nuclear bombs seemed to some of them like some family member who was about to do something terribly self-destructive.

This contact effort was rather controversial, with many people worrying that the Earthers might get their hands on the SSC's more advanced technologies. This would enable the Earthers to fight even more destructive wars, wars that could go outside their homeworld. If the Earthers could travel far enough, they could devastate many of the SSC's cities. So Orthon and others interested in making contact decided on a very cautious approach. They decided to reach out to only a few Earthers, and let them do much of the work. They carefully selected a few who seemed to have the charisma necessary to attract followers, and who would be willing to accept that they were visited by people from elsewhere in the Solar System. George Adamski seemed like a good choice, along with a few other people.

Some aspects of the contact effort were less controversial, however. Aspects like using the Earthers' languages to communicate with the contactees. That would save the contactees a lot of work, and that was less difficult for the SSC people than it might seem. That is because the SSC people involved in Earth-observation efforts had already been doing that, something especially true of the numerous covert-resident observers who lived among the Earthers.

Orthon had earlier arranged that contact meeting by flying out to George's home and giving him a telepathic hint about a place and time to meet. He and the rest of the Aurora crew would be ready at that place and time.