In the First Place

By Pamela Love

“Your testimony is unfinished, Ensign Duffy. Sit.”

Duffy’s knees, already wobbly from stress, buckled, dumping him back down in the witness chair. He faced the unblinking Commodore Brice and her investigative panel.

This isn’t a trial. They promised me I wouldn’t be on trial. Which was true. Besides, I haven’t done anything wrong. Which was not. As far as certain members of the Terran Space Service were concerned—certain powerful members—Walter Duffy had committed the second-gravest possible crime. Not by making them look bad—that was the gravest—but by making himself look better.

“What… What else is there?” Duffy tugged at his sky-blue collar. “I told you everything I know about the extraterrestrials. The Sr’ert, I mean.” He had to stick to accurate statements—the ultra-polygraph would detect any outright lies.

“We’re not interested in the Sr’ert right now, Ensign. We want to talk about you.”

Duffy braced his feet against the floor, trying to keep from sinking under the glare of Commodore Brice. How could something so icy make him want to melt?

Brice gripped the edge of the conference table. “Specifically, why were you the one who made First Contact?”

Duffy sighed. There it was. Why him instead of Commander Luisa Gonzalez? She had a PhD in xenobiology and another in sociology, not to mention a long career of service with the TSS. Once Earth had become aware of the ET’s existence, she’d been the unanimous choice of the Terran Space Service to make First Contact with a sentient alien species. Even the almost-as-qualified scientists accompanying her to the expected meeting site were only there to follow her lead.

“It was just a coincidence.” He rubbed his itchy eyes as he squirmed under the Commodore’s glittering, gray-eyed gaze—which matched the senior officers’ uniforms arrayed in front of him. A united front, which contrasted with the light-blue garb of a solitary ensign. “I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Like my folks used to say, ‘Location, location, location.’” He cringed as his own words stumbled out of his mouth. Way to go, Walt, reminding the panel that you’re just the son of real estate agents and were only on that planet to do ship maintenance while the official team made history. They’re probably wishing they’d brought an A.I. robot instead.

Commodore Brice leaned forward. “Ah, the location. Apparently, the Sr’ert thought we wanted to meet next to our shuttlecraft. In hindsight, their point of view is understandable. That’s where our designated representatives should have been.

“The question is, why were you in that specific place, Ensign? On the ground, outside the shuttle? You should have been inside it. You’d been assigned tasks that should have kept you hard at work for the length of a local day.”

How Duffy wished he had stayed inside swapping out air filters and scrubbing assorted tubing. He was good at that kind of scutwork—that’s why he’d been chosen for the mission when Lieutenant Van der Veen was injured by a genetically-engineered miniature hippopotamus running amok.

Now, instead of living out his days in menial—but serene!—obscurity, the name Walter Duffy would be going down in the history of spaceflight along with people like Neil Armstrong, Angel Rivera, and Deborah Park. Except those people had deserved their renown.

And all because the extraterrestrials had shown up at the shuttle while he’d been outside. He’d only meant to take a breath of fresh air—thirty seconds, tops. Sure, he’d wound up unavoidably delayed and had to stay outside a bit longer fumbling through some pseudo-ferns, but it couldn’t have been for more than a few minutes. Unluckily, that had been enough.

If only he’d been inside when the Sr’ert had arrived! Or if he’d even seen them coming when he was outside, he would have scuttled up the ladder and contacted his superiors. Then they would have returned on the double, and everything could have proceeded according to plan, more or less.

But the Sr’ert had moved so quietly that he hadn’t noticed their approach. He’d heard what he thought was the commander clearing her throat, looked up, and seen the ET standing before him, extending a tentacle in what turned out to be a friendly greeting.

What was he supposed to do? If he ran inside the ship, he’d have offended them.

So, he’d said—“Hi, there”— and stuck out his own hand. Luckily, that turned out to be the right thing to do—at least as far as the aliens were concerned. Not so much the top brass.

By now the ship’s external monitoring footage had been uploaded, and everybody knew about it on Earth. Duffy was wildly popular all over social media.

Now for the reckoning. He had to explain his place in history to a wall of glowering, gray-clad officers. He swallowed hard.

Commodore Brice drummed her fingers on the table. “We’re waiting, Ensign. Did you access classified files to research the ET’s?”

“No.” He sat up a little straighter, knowing himself to be on firmer ground.

“Then how did it happen, Ensign?”

Duffy winced. How am I supposed to admit that I made First Contact because I was looking for my lost contact lens?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pamela Love was born in New Jersey and worked as a teacher and in marketing before becoming a writer. Her work has appeared in Havok, Page & Spine, and Luna Station Quarterly. She is the 2020 winner of the Magazine Merit Fiction Award for her story “The Fog Test,” which appeared in Cricket. She and her family live in Maryland.

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