Chapter 5
Professor Colin Williams, Professor of Advanced Alien Studies, University of North America, watched with half-hearted interest as the lights of Mexico City Megalopolis came into view directly ahead. Williams stretched to relieve the generalized ache that had developed from his legs to his lower torso during the hour-and-a-half flight from Greater New York. He was barely settled into a slightly more comfortable position when the car’s robot brain announced that it was leaving the high altitude transcontinental traffic lanes for more sedate surroundings.
Within minutes, the car had slowed to just under sonic speed and was winging its way over the solid barrier of tourist hotels that hugged the Gulf of Mexico’s eastern shoreline between Tampico and Vera Cruz. Williams watched the pseudo-Aztec pyramids of Mexopolis slide silently beneath, their thousands of lighted windows shedding a dim yellow light across the countryside. In seconds, the man-made mountains were gone and he was over a greenbelt. He found himself gazing down upon a park ablaze with soft, pastel glows. He was low enough that he could plainly see the figures of individuals and family groups strolling the cobblestone walkways.
A short time after, another lighted cliff bulked up before him. The readouts on the car’s autopilot changed pattern as the engine increased its drone. He sat with hands resting lightly on the controls as the car slowed to its prelanding hover, then lowered itself to the megastructure’s roof car park.
Two minutes later, Colin Williams found himself standing in the midst of two square kilometers of rooftop. Beneath his feet, the great anthill that was western hemispheric headquarters for the Community of Nations seemed blissfully unaware of his presence.
* * *
To a casual observer, the map of Planet Earth in the penultimate decade of the twenty-fifth century was not obviously different from any drafted in the previous half-a-thousand years. All land masses remained the same shape, no new mountain ranges had risen from the planetary crust, most major rivers continued unhindered in their journeys to the sea. Human efforts to change the topography remained relatively minor affairs. Mother Nature maintained her powerful monopoly when it came to real geography.
As for the other kind, school children continued to study maps arbitrarily colored in contrasting shades having nothing whatever to do with altitude, climate, or native vegetation. Mostly, these imaginary boundaries continued in the traditional patterns. However, with the advent of instantaneous worldwide communications—first in the form of the primitive INTERNET, later in ever more sophisticated computer arrays—a curious thing had happened. People began to gravitate together because of common interest rather than physical proximity. The rise over two centuries of powerful alliances of industrial, public, and personal interest groups had weakened the old geographic administrative districts.
In their place had risen the Community of Nations—or Communion, as it was popularly called. It had begun life as a mutual aid society, one of many formed after the collapse of the old Council of Sovereign States. Its purposes, as enumerated in the Great Charter, were only three: 1) prevent war, 2) provide a modicum of economic stability, and 3) regulate the introduction of Maker knowledge into Solarian society. As a de facto world government, the Communion was far from perfect. It did, however, have one overpowering virtue.
It had successfully governed the solar system for nearly two hundred years.
* * *
Colin Williams followed a young lady in the green and gold of the Communion Federal Service through the bowels of the great building. They entered lifts, rode slipways, and passed through a seemingly endless succession of corridors. Within two minutes, he had lost all sense of direction. His only clue that they were nearing their destination came when the paneling in the halls turned from pseudo-wood to the real article.
Eventually, his guide stopped in front of a door outwardly identical to a thousand others. She inserted a cardkey into a slot, there was a muted clicking sound, and a centimeter thick steel door slid quietly into its recess. The guide gestured for Williams to step through.
“They’re waiting for you, Citizen.”
Williams thanked her and stepped inside. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see that he was in a large, circular conference hall. Around the perimeter were workstations for a hundred or more delegates. At the moment, the stations were deserted, their consoles darkened. In the center of the room was a rectangular table illuminated by a single bank of overhead lamps. Of the six people clustered around the table, two were reading text from workscreens while the others chatted quietly. Williams recognized Sergei Vischenko, Senior of the Communion’s Planetary Advisors, and the man who had invited him to this late-night session in Mexico City. The purpose behind Vischenko’s request, however, was still a mystery.
Vischenko glanced up as Williams approached the circle of light. “Ah, Colin, glad you could make it. Come down by deep subway?”
Williams shook his head. “Aircar. You’ll find the charter listed as an expense when I submit my consulting fee.”
Vischenko laughed. “Of that, I have no doubt. Do you know my assistant, Javral Pere?”
“I seem to know the name, but I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” Williams said.
“You must read the gossip columns, then,” Vischenko said as his tone turned suddenly mischievous. “Javral is renowned as a ladies’ man throughout high society.”
Pere nodded and coolly shook Williams’ hand. Vischenko took Williams by the arm and led him toward the two women seated at the conference table.
“Professor Colin Williams, University of North America; Constance Okijimara from the League of University Women. Beside her is Jutte Schumann, Deutscher Farben Industrie. The shaggy fellow is Kiral Papandreas, SIAAO Board of Directors. Beside him, Admiral Michael Smithson, Space Guard.
Williams nodded to each committee member in turn, and then took his place at the foot of the table. Vischenko sat at the opposite end.
“Now that we’re all here,” the advisor said, “we can begin. Please enter your names and organizations into your screens.” There were a few moments of silence as everyone complied. When the last member looked up from his work screen, Vischenko continued.
“Javral will now explain why I have asked each of you here tonight.”
The younger man leaned forward, rested his arms on the table. “Earlier today, Kiral Papandreas approached Advisor Vischenko concerning a source of radiation SIAAO’s Achilles Observatory first observed some twelve hours ago. When first sighted, the source was on the outskirts of the solar system. Since that time, it has been moving outward from the sun in a straight line on a vector towards the star Procyon. The astronomers are convinced that we are seeing the wake of an object traveling faster than light.”
“You said the source was moving away from the sun?” Jutte Schumann asked.
“Merely an optical illusion, Jutte,” Kiral Papandreas said from across the table. He quickly reviewing the theory of superluminal shock waves, ending with: “So you see, as it travels through space, a starship will excite the interstellar medium quite vigorously. It will do so over vast distances in essentially zero time. Yet, the resulting radiation propagates only at the speed of light, taking a finite time to arrive where our instruments can observe it. Those particles with the shortest distance to travel arrive first, those from farthest away, last. Thus, it appears as though the source is receding from the observer at the speed of light.”
“Then this mystery ship was traveling from Procyon to Sol?”
Papandreas nodded. “And, since that was the goal of the Pathfinder expedition of the late twenty-second century, it has been suggested that the expedition has now returned to the solar system.”
“Do we know where?”
“We have determined the point where the ship dropped sublight very precisely. It is six billion kilometers out from the sun. We have attempted to spot the ship by scanning an ever-widening volume of space around that point. As of thirty minutes ago, we had not had any success. Hardly surprising, of course. Our standard search techniques rely on the fact that our vessels emit highly conspicuous drive flares while under power. It is logical to assume that a ship with an ftl drive would be propelled by different principles entirely.”
Admiral Smithson lounged back in his chair, stroked at his silver beard, and regarded Papandreas with the squint of someone whose eyesight is less than optimum. “If they’re returning explorers, why haven’t they contacted us?”
“Unknown,” Papandreas said. “It has also been suggested that the starship is crewed by the aliens Pathfinder went to find.”
“Then what took them so long?” Smithson asked. “They should have been here a hundred-fifty years ago.”
The astronomer shrugged. “Who can say? Perhaps the expedition had equipment failure en route and was delayed.”
Constance Okijimara frowned. “It seems to me that we are speculating to no purpose here. After all, the ship dropped sublight more than six billion kilometers out. Whether crewed by humans or aliens, they will be months en route to the inner system.”
“I think not, Connie,” Papandreas muttered. He manipulated a keyboard and a large, three-dimensional graph sprang into existence a meter off the table. “This data comes from the gravitational project inside Achilles asteroid. I am afraid that in all the excitement, no one remembered to check the gravtenna readouts for several hours. When they finally got around to it, they discovered a high frequency disturbance superimposed on the normal background noise. Quite frankly, we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Two quick keystrokes yielded a glowing arrow that floated along one axis of the hologram. “You’ll notice, for instance, that the Doppler shift in the secondary waveform is extremely high. Whatever caused these peculiar gravity waves was moving at high speed when first detected—our calculations indicate just under 300,000 kilometers-per-second.
“Light speed!”
“Close to it,” Papandreas said, manipulating the screen controls once again. Another graph replaced the first.
“That was constructed from data taken six hours after the initial sighting. Note that the secondary phase shift is much reduced. The source has obviously slowed. Now, with two observation points to work from, we can estimate our intruder’s propulsive capabilities.” A series of equations replaced the two graphs. Papandreas glanced up at them and nodded in satisfaction.
“It appears that our mysterious visitor is capable of accelerations on the order of ten thousand meters per second squared. For the soft scientists among you, that’s one thousand gravities!” He turned to Constance Okijimara. “If it were coming here to Earth, it should have arrived several hours ago.”
* * *
By midnight, Kiral Papandreas had convinced nearly everyone that his figures were correct. After that, discussions turned to the problem of finding one small craft in the vast blackness of the solar system. After several other people had offered suggestions, Colin Williams offered his deci-stellar’s worth.
“It’s only an idea, mind you, but if I were a Pathfinder descendant, I think I would want to see the wreck of the probe. The old Lowell Orbiting Telescope is still in use, I believe. It should be large enough to get some kind of useable image if it were turned in that direction. Who knows, we might get lucky and discover that the wreck has visitors.”
Vischenko nodded. “Add that to your list, Kiral. Any other suggestions?”
Jutte Schumann yawned, stretched, and said, “I move that we call it a night, Herr Chairman.
“Seconded!” Papandreas muttered. Fatigue slurred his speech.
“Not quite yet!” Colin Williams shouted. He waited for the others to turn bleary eyes in his direction before continuing more quietly. “I have one other point to bring up before we adjourn. I don’t expect any resolution on this subject immediately, but it is something that needs to be considered.
“The hour is late, Colin,” Vischenko said.
“I’ll take as little time as possible. However, I must speak now, before events outpace our ability to control them.”
“Proceed.”
Williams regarded the others around the table. “Colleagues, I get the distinct impression that we are reaching a consensus regarding the nature of our intruder here. No one has seriously suggested that we face anything other than our own returning expedition. I have heard many of you make reference to the fact that finding this starship on our doorsteps could well be a godsend.”
Javral Pere nodded. “Going to the stars has been a dream of mankind’s for half a thousand years.”
“Precisely the reason we should be careful!” Williams exclaimed. “For five hundred years we’ve let the writers of escapist fiction do our thinking for us. Shouldn’t we at least pause to consider their basic assumptions—or better yet, come up with some originals of our own—before we commit the human race to the unknowns of interstellar space?”
Williams paused. He was pleased to note that the tired expressions were gone. He continued speaking, only this time in the heavy rhythm he usually reserved for the lecture hall. “If asked to describe Homo sapiens in a single word, I think I would choose ‘conceited’ over all others. I suppose there is no help for it. After all, we have been the lords of this planet for fifty thousand years or more. For two thousand generations we have had no natural enemies but ourselves. Over the centuries, we have used and abused our fellow creatures shamelessly, and there has been no one to stop us.
“Colleagues, I’ve spent my entire professional life studying the probe, its mechanisms, and the cargo of knowledge that it carried. I would like to remind each of you of a singularly unpleasant fact. In spite of our inflated egos, we humans are not the end-all and be-all of evolution. Far from it. We share this galaxy with a billion other sentient species; many of who were civilized before our ancestors came down from the trees. Far from being the Lords of Creation, we are merely the largest minnow in a very small pond. Before we venture forth into the great interstellar ocean, shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility that sharks may be lurking among the reefs?”
* * *
Sergei Vischenko had started his political career as a labor negotiator. In the old days, he had been known to go seventy-two hours without sleep during many a marathon bargaining session. His stamina in that period had been renowned by compatriots and adversaries alike. They had called him “Old Iron Eyes.”
Unfortunately, those days were gone. In spite of the best efforts of modern medicine, the years still took their toll. Nothing brought that message home more clearly than the all-night session just ended. Vischenko had finally managed to adjourn the working group just before dawn. Upon returning to his small hacienda on the Pacific Coast, it had been all he could manage to kick off his shoes, turn his sleep field to high, and tumble into it before slipping off into a deep sleep.
He woke slowly, aware that the phone had been buzzing for long minutes. He forced his eyes open, noted the angle of sunlight coming through the slit in the draperies, and groaned. It was barely midmorning. He could not have slept more than two hours—three at the most. That explained the sandpapery burning on the inside of his eyelids and the parched tongue that seemed two sizes too large for his mouth.
Nor had he slept peacefully. He remembered disturbing dreams. A dozen bug-eyed-monsters in plaid zipsuits had chased him through alien landscapes. They had offered him mountains of glass beads in exchange for the Earth. He had been in the act of signing a bill of sale when he woke to the sound of his phone’s incessant bleating.
He keyed the phone for audio only. “Vischenko here.”
The screen lit to show Kiral Papandreas. The man’s eyes had prominent bags under them.
“Are you there, Sergei?” Papandreas asked. His image had that worried look of someone confronted by a blank phone screen.
“I’m here. What’s up?”
“Lowell just reported in. That damned Williams was right! We have two sunlit objects where there should only be one. Resolution is lousy, but not so bad that we can’t identify the second object as a very large ship, roughly spherical. Since everything of ours that size has been accounted for, I’d say we’ve found our starship!”
Vischenko pushed his hands into the sponginess of the sleep field and levered himself to a sitting position. He licked dry lips and tried to concentrate on the news.
“Did you hear me?” Papandreas asked.
Vischenko nodded into the dead pickup. “I heard you. Suggestions as to our next move?”
“Admiral Smithson’s here with me. Let me put him on the extension.”
There was a five second wait, after that the screen split into two parts, adding the features of Michael Smithson to those of Papandreas. Of the two, Smithson looked the more rested by several orders of magnitude. Vischenko wondered if he had managed to steal a nap sometime since dawn.
“Smithson here, sir.”
“What have you got, Admiral?”
“I’ve got three cruisers in position to intercept within the next thirty-six hours. Victrix is closest. She is coming in from Mars and can reach the probe no later than this time tomorrow. Ipsilante and Verdugo are in Earth orbit, and will take a bit longer. Do I have your permission to launch?”
Vischenko struggled to grasp the possible consequences of sending warships out to make contact with the ftl craft. Offhand, he could think of no reason not to. If they were returning colonists, the starship’s crew would understand. If they were aliens, it might be prudent to let them know that humanity was not totally helpless against them.
Vischenko shivered and reminded himself that against any vessel capable of one thousand gravities of acceleration and ftl velocity, they probably were helpless. He looked bleary eyed at the two expectant faces on his phone screen.
“Go ahead, Admiral. But warn those commanders that getting trigger happy will be a guaranteed shortcut to a desk job on Pluto.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve already drafted a message to that effect.”
“Is that all, gentlemen?” Vischenko asked.
“One more thing, Advisor. We’ve got a report of a small civilian vessel out of contact in the vicinity of the probe.”
“Whose?”
“It belongs to Henning’s Roost, the pleasure satellite. However, the pilot is reported to be Chryse Haller.”
“Harrold Haller’s daughter?”
“The same.”
Vischenko thought through this new complication for a half dozen seconds. “Have the cruiser captains keep an eye out for her. Make it clear that this changes nothing. If she has met foul play at the hands of aliens, that is her tough luck. I do not want any incidents until we figure out what we are up against. And with that, gentlemen, I bid you good night!”
The phone flickered to darkness and Sergei Vischenko surrendered once more to the embrace of the sleep field. His body had not stopped its customary oscillations before gentle snores echoed through the bedroom.