Although he'd reviewed the contents of the disk uncountable times, he couldn't refrain from watching it through once more - watching the willowy figures with straw-colored hair and pearlescently white complexions, dressed in sinuous, mutedly colored clothes as they went about their everyday lives on a dying planet.

And he couldn't refrain from once again having ambivalent thoughts about the disk - doubt edged with guilt that cut both ways. What if this was the only evidence left of these beings, whoever they were? Yet what would happen to the way of life he worked to preserve if this became public?

Cal Maguire, who never used his Ph.D. honorific, was a Senior Behavior Specialist with the EAB - the federally funded Education Advancement Bureau, though, among some left-wing cynics, it was known as "Ethics Are Bunk." His job was to do a statistical appraisal of nascent contemporary social trends, and ordinarily he'd be immersed in quantifying shifts in taste, calculating propensities for styles, and engineering the means to manipulate both for the national good.

Despite the cynics, there was an ethical dimension to what he did. The nation had been at war for years - four decades of fighting the world's disaffected, who incomprehensibly believed their lives would be better without America. And as a result, if not for the strategies he was tasked to devise, the nation's morale would be at serious risk. Some deviance was expected, and easily contained, but what if the whole country caved?

Three weeks ago, however, he was confronted by a far graver threat. The head of his division asked him to analyze this disk. "What is it?" he asked.

"We're not sure," his superior replied. "It could be a hoax."

"Where'd you get it?"

"From a used-car salesman who lives on the outskirts of Denver. He's got an unregistered satellite dish he uses to steal cable programming, and he set his TV to record a football game while he was at work. But when he got home that night, he found he had roughly eight hours of this. I gather his first impression was it was some kind of sci-fi miniseries.

"Then he called his next-door neighbor over to take a look. And as luck would have it, his neighbor was a retired Homeland Security agent. The salesman has been interrogated, but seems to be what he claims. So if this is a hoax, as far as we know, he's not the perp.

"The military has had some science types examine the contents. Their consensus is it may be authentic, though they differ on how the salesman managed to capture the signal. The planet, if that's what it is, is in orbit around a dying star, and there's no star like that that's close enough for such a clear transmission to reach us.

"Alternatively, the signal comes from somewhere fairly close by. That could mean these beings, if they're aliens, are also fairly close by. At the very least, some automated alien spacecraft is fairly close by."

"Unless it's a hoax," Cal said.

"And that's where you come in."

"Why me?"

"You have the skill-set to analyze people's behavior."

"Yes, but humans."

"These are bipeds, same as us. Or at least in a general way, they have the same physical characteristics we do... ears... well, sort of... blue-gray eyes... I guess what passes for a nose and a mouth. They hear, they see, they smell, they taste, they talk. And all you have to do is try to get some sense from the way they're behaving of what they're like."

Cal chuckled a bit uncomfortably. "All I have to do?"

"If it's a hoax, there are bound to be inconsistencies you'll be able to spot."

"Just from the ten or so minutes I've seen, it looks like an awfully expensive hoax."

"It could be computer animation."

"Couldn't the scientists tell?"

"Not with absolute certainty."

So Cal reassigned his tasks and began to spend his days on the contents of the disk. But quickly his days grew longer and longer until he finally took the disk home and watched it every waking moment. And by the middle of the second week, he started to get the disquieting feeling he really was watching alien life. It had its own rhythms and attitudes, and an inhuman sense of resignation.

Their planet was dying. They knew it, and there was nothing they could do.

Why didn't they leave? he wondered. They had spaceships, after all - polyhedral craft that seemed to roll throughout their system. But maybe they had no place to go, no planet around some younger star they knew of, or could reach. He listened to their staccato speech littered with glottal stops, and tried to find some meaning in it.

As advanced as they quite obviously were, their everyday technology struck him as being surprisingly simple. They lived in elegant, glass-enclosed cities, but seemed to have no cars, or any discernible public transportation. Their kitchens were stainless-steel functional: electric stove, refrigerator, nuke, and what looked a lot like a Cuisinart. There appeared to be plasma TVs, but no entertainment centers, or anything even remotely like a computer terminal.

Even the styles were far less exotic than he'd have expected they'd be. The design of their furniture fell somewhere between Shaker and Danish Modern. The color palette was Pucci-esque - dark pastels and earth tones. And knickknacks were almost nonexistent, except for an occasional piece of small but delicately graceful glassware.

As consumers, Cal considered, these people seemed minimalist. But maybe their culture was largely ascetic, or maybe, facing the end of their world, they'd succumbed to stylistic ennui.

"People," he bemusedly thought. "I'm starting to call them 'people.' " And he found himself feeling a sympathy for them - not based on knowledge, of which he had none, but on how he'd react if Earth were dying.

Psychologically speaking, as far as he could tell, they seemed unaggressive. Nevertheless, there were two scenes that just might belie that conclusion. In the first, a group was standing around a complex wire construction that had the look of a work of art. Then one of them - evidently a male - tossed something resembling a large wooden marble into the midst of the piece, where it erupted in a violently colorful display.

The other scene also showed a group around a similar wire construction. But now they were all wearing long, brown cloaks, and in the midst of the wire was suspended a naked male. Then someone tossed in a wooden marble, and when the pyrotechnics subsided, the male was clearly dead. Was this some entertainment, or execution, or merely, as it were, their way of dying in a blaze of glory?

What was he really watching? he wondered, as scene after scene went by. He recalled his division head's remark - that the salesman thought he'd accidentally recorded a sci-fi miniseries. But there was no storyline he could detect - nothing that linked one scene to the next, or suggested any dramatic arc. Of course, he reflected, how would he know how an alien story is told? Still, if the scenes really weren't connected, what was the purpose in showing them?

All this appeared to be just a random assortment of alien vignettes - three to as long as ten-minute glimpses of mostly, apparently, mundane events. A woman cooked a meal. A couple strolled down a glass-enclosed walkway. A spaceship approached a gas giant's moon.

He suddenly realized there were no children.

But maybe this was a sort of extraterrestrial photo album - snapshots simply meant to show how these people wanted to be remembered.

Here's how we lived.

Here's how we saw ourselves.

Here's what mattered to us.

This was guaranteed to frustrate the SETI people, Cal thought.

"Oh, God!" he suddenly groaned. Those people could never be shown this disk. The search for intelligent life was a healthy diversion - proof could be a disaster. Especially this kind of proof because it evoked, but didn't inform. It was open to any interpretation - an intellectual latitude that a country at war just couldn't afford.

It wouldn't be hard for pacifists to put their spin on these aliens. It wouldn't be hard for the insecure to become even more neurotic. It wouldn't be hard for the national will - always vulnerable - to start to erode.

Yes, there is alien life - or there was - and facing a challenge, it simply gave up.

No children, he thought. Why not? You'd think they'd want their kids remembered, too. But maybe there weren't any. Maybe - though he didn't know the science involved - their slowly bloating, reddening sun had somehow sterilized them all. If so, then what he was seeing could be these people's very last generation.

He felt an extraordinary melancholy - an emptiness - a futility.

He finally told his department head what he thought should be done with the disk.

"I wondered if that's what you'd think," his superior said. "I thought so, too."

"Is this the only copy?"

"As far as I know, but I'll certainly check."

"You want to destroy it?"

His superior sighed. "You made the determination. You do it."

Watching the final scene once more, Cal tried to grasp some implication. A couple stood on an observation deck far above their city, gazing toward the sere-brown horizon, beyond which their blood-red sun was setting. The man put a hand on the woman's shoulder - his wife? - and said something brief - "I love you"? Then they suppley walked out of view.

Despite his regret, Cal did the right thing.

Copyright 2004 by Ralph Sperry