InterstellarNet: Origins (3 page)

“Don’t blame me or the gold team. Yours was one of the few assignments Kim had made before Steering even met.” A boarding announcement from a staticky PA drowned out Bridget’s next words.

“What?”

“I asked, ‘How is it that things turned out okay?’ ”

“Had it been up to me, I would’ve had a tough time deciding between Signals, Analysis, and Reply. It occurred to me that someone on the red team has to liaise with those other committees. A technically oriented point of contact made sense. So I’ve gotten myself access to all the information that Steering has, without, no offense, enduring all that bureaucratic ponderousness.”

“No offense taken.” She laughed. “Well, maybe a little. In any case, I’m off to my gate. I’m glad it worked out for you.”

He found the silver lining to her abrupt departure. It avoided the awkward question about who, since it wasn’t the Steering Committee, wanted him on the Media & Education team. It could not have been Kim’s idea: Kim could not possibly have ever heard about Dean.

At least the Undersecretary-General was unlikely to have heard about Matthews absent input from the US ambassador.

From the Earth First chat room:

All_Politics_Is_Local:
So what is with the Lalande task force and its closed-door “organizational” meeting?

Stop_World_Government:
What’s the UN *always* up to? ET’s message is simply another excuse for worldwide government. Whatever the task force is for—I’m against it.

All_Politics_Is_Local:
It’s welfare for rich-country scientists. Would a Bangladeshi textile worker think this is the best use for the money?

Radical_Dude
: There is common cause among world-government resisters, ET skeptics, and Third World advocates. Expect the UN to get a taste of what we gave the WTO in Seattle in ’99.

3

Alex Klein had alerted Dean to the unadvertised coordination between the Russian and American militaries and the Steering Committee. One thing led to another, and here Matthews was at a Manhattan deli with a Russian general and ex-cosmonaut.

Vladimir Grigorivich Antinov began his career in the Red Air Force. He’d been an advisor to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, a time he declined to discuss. He had graduated to, and risen rapidly in, the then-Soviet strategic rocket forces. Combining piloting and missile expertise, he had moved into the cosmonaut corps. He’d served two tours aboard
Mir
, one as mission commander. His English, from years of joint planning with NASA, was excellent.

After an exchange of pleasantries and the ordering of lunches, Dean got to the point. “To be honest, I’m surprised that the militaries care about ET.”

Antinov dumped spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his tea. “Our job is to worry.”

“About what? ET is
far
away.”

“That is an assumption it is best to validate.”

A curious rebuttal. Delivery of their sandwiches gave Dean a chance to consider it. ET’s signal was quickly recognized as artificial because of the pi factor. That observed wavelength, however, depended on the wavelength originally transmitted
and
Doppler shift due to relative motion between sender and receiver. Lalande 21185 and the sun moved relative to each other. ET’s unseen planet must, like Earth, orbit its sun and rotate about its axis. The signal should have wobbled continuously around its “look at me” wavelength.

It didn’t.

Without any decoding of content, that observation alone showed that the message was intended specifically for Earth. It meant that ET saw Earth well enough to measure its orbit and rotation, and then dynamically tune his signal accordingly.

“In ten years
we
could have a telescope able to resolve Earth-sized planets of nearby stars,” Dean said. “NASA has requested funding for one for years. ET seeing Earth doesn’t require technology much beyond ours.”

Antinov waved over the waitress for another pot of hot water. “Or ET could be much closer. If he can correct a signal for planetary motions, his and ours, he can as easily compensate for blue shift to disguise transmission from an approaching vessel.”

“But why announce your existence
and
hide your arrival?”

“The message may announce a visit. As you well know, we cannot yet read it.”

Might ET be announcing his arrival? Matthews shoved away his plate, half a corned beef on rye untouched. He had heard nothing like this from anyone on the task force. “Since we’re discussing this in a crowded deli, you can’t be too concerned.”

“Did I have too much fun with you? I will explain what my people and yours are doing: probing with our most powerful radars along the signal path. These radars can detect the smallest bits of space junk in Earth orbit. We can track a dropped bolt that is hundreds of kilometers high. More than once,” the cosmonaut smiled, “that has been a useful capability. We would expect to detect a starship
much
farther away. As yet, there has been no return pulse.”

Matthews had never worked with military radar, but thought he could make an intelligent guess at its sensitivity from an understanding of radio telescopes. “If ET is coming, he’s still well outside our solar system. Or stealthed.”

Antinov winked at the mention of stealth. “I commend your newfound paranoia, though in this case such caution may be excessive. To visit us, a vessel must travel at very high speed through the scattered matter that makes interstellar space only a
near
vacuum. Could a ship maintain stealthiness against the ongoing particle bombardment? Would it not radiate, whether from collisions with such particles or some protective force field? We’ve seen no such evidence.

“We’ve even used the comet watcher trick of flipping back and forth between telescope photographs taken on successive nights of the same patch of sky. There are no unexpected moving objects, nor any unexpected occluded stars.”

“You
have
been busy.”

“We do only what your Space Command has done, I think.”

Matthews grabbed the check. “So are you convinced that the signal is genuine, and from Lalande 21185?”

“It has been a most pleasant discussion, but duty calls.” Antinov stood. “As for your question, I am
almost
convinced.

“I am entirely certain that were ET able to sneak up on us, nothing we could do in preparation would matter.”

4

“…And still no comment from the United Nations investigation. Has ET’s signal been lost? If so, what does that mean? Is the UN covering up? We want to hear from
you
.”

The radio call-in show was Dean’s regular breakfast companion, entertaining when he successfully compartmentalized the sorry implications about the state of education. Today’s broadcast was annoying rather than amusing, however—even though, oddly enough, it had the facts mostly correct.

The signal from Lalande 21185
had
vanished the night before.

He retrieved the day’s
Washington
Post
from the curb. Loss of signal was front-page news, with attribution to the SETI Institute, the Planetary Society, and Cal Tech. As he had foreseen, universities and science-interest groups had built their own antenna arrays—and they were free to announce findings how and when they pleased. That usually meant only a phone call or email to a buddy at a peer institution to confirm an observation or analysis.

Dean had phoned Ricard after getting an alert from Signals, urging the committee head to issue a statement. Ricard instead ruled that the matter needed a Media & Education consensus recommendation to the steerers. Damned committee process!

Dean stuffed the newspaper into his briefcase. There would be time for it on the shuttle to New York for the emergency meeting.

■□■

The early work of Media & Education had lulled Matthews into a false sense of security: The task force’s original findings were uncontroversial and so quickly released. For those first few days they had had a monopoly on signal reception.

Things changed once independent observatories came online and the bulk of the repeating message was posted to the ’net. Now the task force was in a race with every other interested party to interpret ET’s message.

That message started simply enough: two pulse trains counting from one to 128. Next came hours of data without apparent pattern. Analysts had quickly recognized that the data immediately following the two pulse trains of 128 formed a two-dimensional, 128-by-128 pixel image. The image was simple but informative: rows of tick marks, from one to sixteen, each set paired with an alien symbol. ET was communicating by what amounted to facsimile transmission, he counted in octal, and he had shown Earth how he wrote his numerals—a quickly approved press release.

The bottom left corner of that first image carried ET’s symbol for one: He was enumerating images. The bottom right corner bore two numbers: 128 twice. As suggested, the next part of the message could be read as another 128-by-128 image.

Subsequent images were easily recognized as math lessons, building a common mathematical vocabulary. None of the symbols matched human conventions, of course, but there were no surprises at that early stage as to message meaning. The committee had little difficulty drafting a press release citing a shared view of arithmetic.

Contention arose with the next few images, perhaps not coincidentally because an undergrad physics major at the University of Calgary was the first to interpret them. She identified one drawing as a spectrogram, a plot of energy intensity versus frequency, of the star Lalande 21185. The next graphic was a similar spectrogram for the sun.

Beyond confirming the source and destination of ET’s communication, those images introduced two new symbols: us and them. The solar spectrogram had one other novel aspect: a corner annotation indicating that a three-dimensional dataset followed. The 3-D dataset appeared to be a series of spectrograms, successively more crowded, but otherwise mysterious. The net effect was a crude animation, like a child’s flipbook. The meaning of the dataset’s third dimension remained unclear. Intriguingly, each 2-D slice bore the symbol for “us.”

The committee was slow to comment on these images. The media types (and Dean agreed) proposed simply stating that two new symbols had been decoded, but that the following dataset remained under study. The behavioral-response contingent thought it necessary to put these findings “into a suitable context” to protect fragile human egos. “To those countries that were recently colonies of the West, ‘us and them’ distinctions are sensitive matters,” was one Third World sociologist’s assertion. The behavioral-response folks were further concerned that an admission “ ‘we’ had failed to understand” a dataset could make humans feel inferior to, hence threatened by, ET.

Dean just did not get their point. “Us” and “them” were merely pronouns. An undecoded dataset so early in the effort also failed to faze him. Why should ET’s message be immediately clear? ET was
alien
. The committee waffled for two days, by which time the external media had moved on to newer news.

■□■

Waiting for the emergency meeting to start, Dean wondered if the committee had learned its lesson. The loss of signal was already widely known; he felt they should just acknowledge it.

Ricard had inexplicably brought a gavel, which he wielded to open the meeting. Some overseas members, unable to attend the short-notice session in person, were videoconferenced in by encrypted network link. They winced as the chairman pounded too close to the mike.

“Thank you all for coming.” After too many pleasantries, Ricard came to the point. “It has been reported that the signal from ET has been lost. The matter being so important, we will discuss a suitable statement for recommendation to the Steering Committee.” Heads nodded.

“Point of clarification,” Dean said. “A more precise statement is that the signal has ceased. Every observatory, government-funded and other, reports the same thing.” He had been online for much of his flight; the message boards were unanimous about the time that the signal had disappeared. It had not faded or been randomly garbled by cosmic interference, both of which had often happened. The signal was just
gone
.

“Do we know why?” someone asked.

“The short and honest answer is no. On the ’net, the most common guess is that ET’s orbit is bringing him to the side of his sun opposite us, so he’s stopped sending until he can get a clean signal through again. Perhaps, once we’ve decoded the entire message, he will have told us.”

In a pleasant surprise, reason won out. The not-too-tardy press release simply reported the cessation of transmission.