Will Harden

Interstellar Advocate: the Story of a Woman Who Worked to Create Friendship Between Earth and Another World Will Harden

Publisher Marketing: Synopsis for "Sci-Fi Writer." John Preston, an obscure ex-linguistics professor and writer is called by Homeland Security to communicate with four aliens after a saucer crash. He is getting nowhere until they bring in his wife, Dr. Sandra Preston to, attend to medical problems. Using the same gentle touching and soft words she used to give a shot to a five-year old, she begins to get brief eye contact. It is not until she works desperately to save the most injured one of the tiny beings that she becomes a mother image to them. When their ship arrives to take them home, they invite the Prestons to go back with them to their planet Belacar. The voyage takes fourteen years but due to time dilation, seems like three months. When they arrive, the people of Balacar, who call themselves Damanians, welcome the Prestons as heroes for helping to get the saucer crew out of the confinement of the US military. The couple enjoy six months of paradise where the tiny, under five-foot people, press forward to meet them and show them their magnificent planet. They meet the president and John amazes them by speaking before the Grand Council in semi-fluent Damanian. But their real adoration is for Sandy as they ask how any being would work so hard to save one different from her, the way she did for their saucer captain. Sandy is given medicines to cure most human diseases while John takes better than a thousand pictures. They return to an Earth thirty years older and scared by a limited nuclear war in the Mideast. China has taken over our banks and our dollar has been replaced by the Yuan. They have almost no money and no one accepts their ID's that say they are over sixty years old. After finding, Dan, one of the people from the project dying at a hospice center, Sandy saves him by giving him a series of pills to cure his lung cancer. Since they are homeless and almost penniless they offer their work as custodians in return for sleeping in the basement. Sandy begins to cure the rest of the people who have cancer as well and is arrested for dispensing medicine without a medical license. While she is in jail the pictures from Balacar are shown on TV and there is an instant protest from every news and media person in the country. She is released in less than twenty hours and becomes a household word for every English-speaking person of the world. During the next few weeks she and John take two of the Damanians to the CDC, visit the White House and appear on almost a dozen talk shows. By the time a year has passed, the Prestons manage a spaceport fifty miles west of Washington, and embassy for Balacar and an institute for interplanetary studies.