What’s In a Name?

Suddenly every radio station in the world turns to white noise and a voice reads out a single name. The engineers are flummoxed. Much of the radio audience gets on Facebook immediately. The questions fly. 

Don Foulks in California, Steve Robertson in Arizona and Natalie Reynolds, vacationing in Botswana, are the first to figure it out. Back in high school, Steve and Don and their buddies had recorded their version of that famous Mercury Theater radio show on acetate. The three haven’t seen each other in years, but they are of one mind when they hear the name. This time it’s not one network; the effect is world-wide. Someone must have a lot of power to pull it off. But who? and are they on this planet? Is it a joke or a warning, and how do they find out? 

Don knows the guys at the local radio station and goes down to talk to the engineer, who messages other stations and finds that it happened at the same instant everywhere. It has to be satellites, and big ones. That’s a lot of money to put into a joke, but somebody might.

Don is not a conspiracy theorist. He and Steve and Natalie are all science fiction fans, though, from Heinlein’s Red Planet to Bisson’s Voyage to the Red Planet. They want it to be aliens. They expect they’ll have to settle for a Donald Trump type with a sense of humor. 

Natalie explains their conversation to her travel buddy, Joyce. Joyce volunteers to call her niece who works for the US delegation to the UN. She puts her phone on speaker.

“Hi, honey...” she begins. 

“Aunt Joyce! Things are crazy here, but when I saw your ID…” 

“I know a couple of engineers,” says Joyce. “They say they don’t know how this thing could have been accomplished from earth’s surface…” 

“That’s what we’ve heard too,” says her niece. 

“They say it has to be several satellites to do the trick. They think it’s. . .I know this sounds like a cliché...but they think it’s Martians, and here’s why. The name. Rosebud.” 

“Rosebud? That’s a name?” 

“It’s Citizen Kane’s sled.”

“And Citizen Kane is…?”

“It’s a forties movie by Orson Welles. See, he did a radio broadcast too, War of the Worlds, that fooled some people into thinking the earth was being invaded by Martians. So this is either the beginning of an invasion from Mars and they are letting us know they know a lot about us, or it’s a joke by someone local.”

“No, the UN has checked with NASA and all the space agencies and there’s nothing out there that’s not accounted for.”

“Yikes!” says Joyce. “Then it is an invasion.”

“Maybe not,” interjects Natalie. “Maybe it’s Martians with a sense of humor and this is a planetary fan letter to Orson Welles.”

What do you think?