Damn! I wrote a long reply to this, and the hamsters ate it! This is harder than building an Interociter. Let me try again:
I’ve got the perfect screen name for replying to this.
As has been mentioned above, you shouldn’t go by the MST3K version, which has been severely cut. Unfortunately, if you want the real story, you ahouldn’t go by the original movie version, either – they cut the novel so badly that they never even explain what the title means. They effectivelt jettisoned the original story after Cal Meacham (no relation) boards the alien plane and heads off for his “job interview”. They then fabricated their own original story, apparently basing it on the more lurid SF magazine covers, adding such elements as bare-brained and lobster-clawed “mutants”, flying saucers, doomed alien civilizations, and magnetized hand rails. Ain’t none of this in the book. (And I read an interview with one of those responsible for these changes a few years ago. They’re proud of what they wrought! Some people shouldn’t be let loose near an unfilmed script.)
The novel by Raymond F. Jones was the result of spot-welding together a series of short stories he wrote, starting with “The Alien Machine”, which is almost faithfully rendered in the film. Technologist Cal Meacham receives a mysterious package of parts made by highly-advanced alien technology. Out of curiousity, he orders the whole shebang from the alien catalog, and he figures out how to put them together. Unlike the film, in the story there is no schematic – he has to dope it out for himself. This is, after all, an aptitude test, so sending him the instructions would be counterproductive. Cal even has to rebuild a broken part. There are cute touches, too – you get glimpses of some of the othger alien “aptitude tests”, like the one sent to the mechanical engineer.
Cal builds the Interociter, and is contacted over it by the Alien leader, a guy named “Mr. Jorganasvara” (again, unlike the movie’s “Mr. Exeter”. Maybe the filmmakers thought “Jorganasvara” sounded too Swedish, or too Indian, or something. Too foreign, anyway. So “Exeter” sounds nice a British, because, God knows, we wouldn’t want any foreign aliens invloved.) He’s invited to fly to an in-person interview, and the Interociter self-destructs.
It turns out that Jorganasvara’s people (they’re not from “Metaluna”, if memory serves, but I’ll use that name for simplicity here) are a super-civilization at war with another super-civilization. Earth is in a backwater of the war, just as many Pacific islands were caught in the war between Japan and the US in WWII. Like them, we are far below the combatants in tech and resources, and, again like them, we have a stake in the outcome of the bAttle, and can help. The “Metalunans” want us to build Interociters for them (they can be used as weapons, it turns out), thus freeing the Metalunan scientists to work on more advanced weapons. We’re being asked to contribute to the war effort to the extent of our abilities, just like those Pacific Islanders were asked to help build landing strips and the like =–= hence the title of the book and the movie.
I suspect the film makers dropped this aspect like a hot potato because it didn’t cast us Earth people in such a good light – we were mere low-class helpers in a war beyond our ability. We ought to be leading the effort. So they changed it to make the earth scientists being brought over to do the work for people who have already developed interstellar travel. This is, of course, ludicrous, but that hasn’t stopped this basic idea from showing up a lot in science fiction. The Earth folks beating or helping the much more advanced alien visitors. One of the things I liked about the book TIE is that it put us in the proper perspexctive, for once.
There were no “mutants”, no planets being bombed into suns (!!!), no flying saucers (in the book, the “Metalunan” craft is, as was so often in pre- and immediately post-UFO days, an ovoid), no dying civilzations. The book has recently been reprinted, at long last, and is worth a read.
In regards to Ruth? Shame , pure shame!