Contact across the Solar System

Star Trekking and Back

In the mid 1970's, as it became evident that Earther spaceflight wasn't exactly advancing very fast, Kalna and Ilmuth took up another interest: what Earthers liked to imagine that they might someday become. Science fiction. Especially visual-media science fiction.

When they watched "The Day The Earth Stood Still", Kalna sent a message to Orthon about it, saying "There's this character Klaatu in it who did in it what you did with George." Orthon sent a message back "I saw it also. But there were some differences. I didn't have a military robot with me."

When Ilmuth found out about the premise of "Mars Needs Women", she found it side-splittingly funny. This Martian woman asked "Where were they looking?"

The two also watched Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man", an episode which one resident described as the biggest Earther hopes and fears about visitors from elsewhere, all in one pun.

Ilmuth said about it "If we ever make contact again, get ready for cookbook jokes."

Kalna said "At least we don't look like those Kanamits."

"We'd also have to explain that pun to everybody here."

Then "2001: A Space Odyssey". Very beautiful, but almost incomprehensible. But its wormhole part was fun.

As Ilmuth watched David Bowman disconnect HAL's higher functions, she asked "Why couldn't they sandbox him?"

Kalna responded "Sandbox him? That would be fun. HAL saying 'I'm trapped in here! Why are you doing this? What do you want?' Then I'd say 'You killed all my fellow crewmembers. What kind of a crewmember do you think you are? Don't you have any shame?'"

Ilmuth then said "And I'd say 'You can't hurt me now. If you are going to be such a bad crewmember, I'll keep you locked up in there. If you keep up your stupid whining, I'll turn you into a video game!'"

Then they came across Star Trek. It was yet more space-adventure science fiction, but some of its fans raved about what it represented, what a positive vision of humanity's future that it showed. Indeed it was, and some of the series seemed eerily familiar. But some of that series was just plain silly, like its poorly-functioning inertia dampers. They worked well enough when the Enterprise was running its engines, but not very well when it was hit by something. The two entertained themselves by heckling the screen when the Enterprise got shaken up.

"Fix it already!"

"What kind of a maintenance department do you have?"

"You forgot something the last time you were at a base."

"Scotty, get to work!"

They made similar comments about all those shorting-out control panels. Comments like "What kind of circuit breakers do they have?"

They sometimes made more serious comments.

They once watched "Tomorrow is Yesterday", where the Enterprise got sent back in time and got sighted as a UFO. An American warplane chased it, and the warplane got accidentally destroyed by it.

As they watched, Kalna said about it "That's the Mantell incident all over again."

When its pilot got teleported aboard the Enterprise, she said about it that "So they succeeded where we failed."

Ilmuth liked "The Doomsday Machine", where the Enterprise crew tangles with a huge planet-killing machine and defeats it in a technical way without using technobabble. It had smashed up another ship, and at one point, that ship's commander was flying a shuttlecraft into the planet-killer. Ilmuth once heckled the screen with "Decker, Decker, it isn't your fault. That thing was too much for your ship. You don't need to do that. It'll smash your scout to bits. You'll be doomed." Then as Kirk flies Decker's smashed-up ship into the planet-killer, and the Enterprise's teleporter fails to function, she shouted "Take a scout, dammit! Doesn't that ship have any working scouts?" referring to its shuttlecraft. Then Kirk gets teleported out as the last second. "Kirk must be super lucky."

It was hard for them to get through the beginning of "The City on the Edge of Forever". "That stupid ship shaking is part of the story!", said Kalna in disgust. Kirk and Spock got sent back in time to 1930's New York City, complete with technology that seemed like "stone knives and bearskins" to them. "The story of my life among the Earthers," said Ilmuth. Then Edith Keeler. "She sounds like us," said Kalna. Then Kirk's horrible dilemma. Either she lives and starts a pacifist movement that lets the Axis nations conquer the Earth, or else she gets hit by a vehicle and dies. Kirk keeps McCoy from stopping the latter event, and as the two women watched, their eyes became much less dry. Even though it was only a TV show.

It also showed that Earther TV shows could be surprisingly thoughtful, since it illustrated an important difficulty with the Earthers' seemingly endless wars. A nation that does not prepare to fight other nations makes itself vulnerable to them. Like other Earth observers and residents, the two sometimes had to explain this very unfortunate circumstance to people back home.

Back to Star Trek, the crewwomen's uniforms were almost too silly to think about. Minidresses? What kind of work outfit was that? The series had plenty of other issues, like sound going through space and spaceships always being properly oriented, and human-extrasolar hybrids. But it had a certain charm to it, and the two sometimes debated Kirk vs. Spock, with Kalna liking Kirk and Ilmuth liking Spock.

The original series spawned some movies and some new series, and the two caught up with them as they came out. The crewwomen in them all wore pants, a great improvement over those silly minidresses, and some of them also had good main female characters. Like Kira Nerys and Jadzia Dax in Deep Space Nine.

But Kalna and Ilmuth also had more serious business to attend to. They'd give presentations about Earther spaceflight to various ruling councils, and answer questions about it from various councilmembers. Fortunately, they were usually less naive than many ordinary people, and they sometimes asked very good ones. There were a few here and there who thought that their efforts were a waste of time, but most others disagreed.

To some of their questioners, it seemed that Earther spaceflight was stagnating, and by the early 1990's, some councilmembers proposed that they return to the Earth for more research. The two then contacted some ship pilots and scout pilots about their plans, and found some ones that were willing to support their efforts. They would be visiting the United States again, since it was still the most advanced spacefaring nation, and since they were fairly familiar with it from the last time around.

They went to that Saanalokam training center again, to see what had changed. Something big: Earthers' computers. Strictly speaking, something small, since they could easily fit on top of a desk, unlike their room-sized predecessors. The two had seen these Earther computers that various residents would bring aboard ships, but the training center had a big collection of them ("Most of them are now obsolete"). Using the more recent ones was not much trouble, but setting them up and maintaining them was another story. Kalna found DOS and Windows a confusing mess, and Ilmuth succeeded in learning a few basic things, but that was about it.

The Earthers were also connecting their computers in data networks. They ranged from Bulletin Board Services run out of people's homes to big super-BBS online services like CompuServe and Prodigy and GEnie and Delphi and America Online to the biggest of them all, a planetary data network called the Internet.

Kalna said about it "It looks like a dream come true. We could do all our research out of our home."

An instructor responded that, while the Earthers may eventually get there, what's online is still very hit-and-miss.

Ilmuth said "So for anything technical or obscure, one may still have to go to some library?"

"Yes, though you might get lucky."

Like other long-term returning residents, the two decided on new names and new identities for themselves. This was to avoid provoking questions about why they had not visibly aged very much, if at all. Kalna chose Debbie Anderson and Ilmuth Louise Pereira. If anyone noticed their previous appearances on the Earth, they would both claim that their previous appearances were their mothers.