Detringer’s first contact with Earth

Detringer’s first contact with Earth turns a sentence of banishment into an encounter of historic importance: the Ferlang exile becomes the first alien met by the people of Earth, not as an accredited representative but as a stranded fugitive whose immediate concern is survival. The meeting begins after a hazardous crossing of the Void and a desperate landing on a planet Detringer believes uninhabited. When a human spacecraft touches down nearby, he walks out to meet its crew; soon reporters, marines, and a translating computer have transformed the encounter into a public interview.

Banishment and the crossing

Detringer’s route to first contact begins with the offenses that made him an exile. On Ferlang, he had sucked his teeth during the Meditation Frolic, switched his tail the wrong way when the Regional Grand Ubiquitor spat at him, and persisted in recalling sexual exploits aloud during Godmemory Meeting. Those acts were compounded by an unprecedented act of public aggression: he injured a Ukanister, causing little bodily harm but, as the narration stresses, considerable damage to the victim’s ego. For that final offense, the authorities imposed extraterrestrial banishment rather than the lesser punishment of decades of Plenary Ostracism.

Ferlang lies on the fourth planet of a fifteen-planet system near the edge of the galaxy. Detringer was carried far into intergalactic space aboard a starship, then set adrift in a small, underpowered Sportster. Ichor, his loyal mechanical servant, chose to accompany him. Detringer’s wives divorced him, and his eight children formally repudiated him; the youngest, Bethanie, nevertheless expressed love for her father. He was not allowed to know of that exception, leaving him to face exile as if his family had entirely abandoned him.

The Sportster’s limited power made the voyage a slow emergency. Detringer shut off its engines to conserve fuel for the unlikely possibility of planetary maneuvering. As oxygen, food, and energy dwindled, he endured cold, thirst, hunger, and the persistent headache of oxygen deprivation, while imposing strict rations on himself. He countered the isolation through small routines: tending to the failing ship, giving Ichor a nightly concert despite the servant’s lack of musical sensitivity, exercising, meditating, and following the solitary practices described in the Solitude Survival Book. These actions did not make escape more likely, but they gave structure to a stretch of time the narration describes as motionless.

A refuge with no way out

The stillness broke when an electrical storm swept the Sportster into the Void. The craft survived partly because it was too inadequate to resist the storm: driven along by it, the ship yielded rather than breaking apart. After a period of unconsciousness, Detringer checked his surroundings and instruments and discovered that they had crossed the Void and were approaching a planetary system. Its sun was an O-type star, and the system contained nineteen planets. Ichor celebrated the discovery, then collapsed when his batteries ran out; Detringer recharged him from the ship’s accumulators.

That apparent rescue brought a new problem. Detringer’s reading indicated that the system’s fifth planet was the only one able to sustain his needs without imported artificialities, but the Sportster lacked the fuel to reach it. With the storm gone and space calm again, the pair had no current to carry them onward. Their resources continued to fail, and Ichor begged Detringer to sacrifice his personal batteries to warm the ship. Detringer refused to separate their chances of survival in that way, insisting that they would face the end together as equals if it came.

A strong inbound current arrived just as their energy was nearly gone. Detringer used it to reach the fifth planet, landing so gently that the narration compares the ship’s descent to thistledown. The Sportster had only thirty-eight seconds of fuel left when he shut down its engines. The world proved hospitable: its necessities could be found with moderate effort, although it offered few amenities. Yet it was also a prison. Escape required complex engine fuel that only an advanced technological civilization could make, and Detringer’s aerial survey found no civilization or sign of intelligent life.

The spacecraft arrives

The expectation of isolation ended when Detringer and Ichor watched a large alien spacecraft descend to a faultless landing nearby. Detringer admired the pilot’s apparent skill and wanted to meet the being responsible. Ichor observed that, across the whole planet, the newcomers had chosen a landing place almost beside them. The encounter was therefore not the result of Detringer reaching an inhabited world in search of help; a second spacecraft arrived at the refuge where the castaway had already settled.

Detringer decided to take a bold approach. Ichor recognized the historical scale of the meeting: a representative of the Ferlang people was about to meet intelligent aliens for the first time. Detringer rejected the implication that he had sought this diplomatic role. He also instructed Ichor that they would say nothing about his differences with the Ferlang authorities. The decision gives the encounter an immediate tension between public significance and private identity. The figure who appears to stand for his people is, in fact, a condemned exile intent on withholding the circumstances that brought him there.

First words and a public interview

The human spacecraft was the Jenny Lind. Everyone aboard knew that an alien craft was only a mile away, but that knowledge did not prepare the crew for a living alien advancing toward Kettelman’s marines. The narration dwells on the crew’s anxiety about the historic moment: officers rehearsed possible greetings, marines hoped the alien would not speak to them, and the cook worried that he might immediately be asked about food. Their hesitation turns first contact into a problem of performance. Any opening line, they fear, could sound pompous or banal to generations afterward.

Detringer stepped forward with Ichor behind him. His appearance is described through an incongruous comparison to an ambassador being presented at the court of Louis XIV, briefly framing the exile as a formal envoy despite his actual status. The ship’s C31 Translating Computer offered a means to speak, but the first exchange came from a reporter testing it. Detringer demonstrated that he understood the words. The crew’s relief at finally hearing the first words spoken to Earth’s first alien was mixed with amusement at the reporter’s likely place in history for asking such an unceremonious question.

The reporters then rushed out of the Stasis Freeze room, some still trailing tubes and wires. They retrieved their cassette recorders, gathered around the C31 Translating Computer, and took its microphones; Detringer hesitated before accepting one. The interview quickly ranged far beyond diplomacy. He was asked about food, sleep, sex and its departures from Ferlang norms, his first impressions of Earthmen, his philosophy, wives and children, work, hobbies, gardening, recreation, intoxication, sports, interstellar relations, and the advantages and disadvantages of having a tail. The sheer range of questions made the alien encounter both a historical event and a media spectacle, pressing one exhausted individual to explain an entire unfamiliar life.

Edward Makepeace Macmillan eventually came forward, feeling that he had neglected his official duties, and rescued Detringer from the reporters. The episode’s central irony remains intact: the first representative of Ferlang encountered by Earth is a man his own authorities expelled, and the humans’ carefully anticipated meeting becomes an unruly interview about the most personal details of his existence. For Detringer, first contact offers no simple return from exile; for Earth, it begins not with a polished diplomatic exchange but with a stranded survivor answering questions through a machine.