Chapter 5:
Preparations for
a Visit
“How certain are your people that Fenrir is using antimatter for its energy generation?” asked Alyosha Volkov. “I mean, it’s an exciting thought, especially given that we can only create and store nanograms of antimatter ourselves.”
Volkov was a special scientific envoy for the Russian President, and Sacco had found him unexpectedly cheerful and energetic. So much for stereotypes of the gloomy Russian, she thought. “They seem quite certain, but I’m not one of the scientists. York?”
A big, barrel-chested man stood up at the end of the conference table; he, too, was a breaker of stereotypes. As far as Jeanne Sacco was concerned, Dr. York Dobyns certainly didn’t look like a man twice-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics—in fact, he looked more like an outdoorsman, with his close-cropped beard and mustache and rather less-than-formal khakis and hiking boots. “Well, we can actually do much better than nanograms, we just generally don’t. In any event, they either are using antimatter, or they’ve got some really science-fictional technology that can convert matter direct to energy. Dr. Bronson, did we get those slides in time?”
Stephanie Bronson nodded—not bothering, Sacco noted, to correct the mode of address. “Just a minute, Dr. Dobyns.” After a moment, two graphs appeared on the presentation screen.
“Ah! Yes, that’s it. See here, this is the curve of radiated energy from Fenrir, and this is its acceleration. Now, you’ll note that the acceleration has remained constant—very much so—but the energy expended is falling gradually. Now from this, we can deduce that the mass of Fenrir is slowly decreasing. This mass, of course, has to be, for want of a better word, their fuel, whatever they’re using to provide them with the power we see.
“So if we compare the radiated energy and the calculated mass reduction and the deceleration, we arrive at the conclusion that they are using some method of total energy conversion. The only such technology we know exists would be matter-antimatter annihilation. It is of course possible they have something entirely outside our knowledge, but for now Occam’s razor suggests that we assume they’re making use of the method we at least theoretically understand.”
Alyosha nodded, as did most of the other seven representatives around the table—from China, India, the United Kingdom, the EU, Japan, Brazil, and Canada. Larger briefings would include as many countries as possible, but President Sacco knew that it would be hard to get clear direction even from a group this size, let alone one far larger.
That wasn’t helped, of course, by the fact that Fenrir was a problem unlike any the world had ever faced.
“Unpleasant though it may be to consider,” Osamu Kurumada said, “but have we any data on what sort of weapons Fenrir may have, if it is hostile?”
Stephanie Bronson glanced at her team, especially at York, who simply nodded, then shrugged. “I have a small presentation on our various guesses, but we really don’t have much information on which to make any realistic assessment. Worst-case, they could have missiles that make use of the same drive the ship does, and could drive them with higher accelerations, so in theory they could hit us with impacts at significant fractions of c.”
“Which would be absolutely devastating,” Dr. Dobyns said. “To give you an idea, a single two-ton projectile at the same speed as Fenrir was traveling—thirty percent of lightspeed—would deliver an impact of two gigatons. They could have gamma-ray lasers that would carve through mountains or . . .” He waved his hands to indicate and pretty much anything else. “Seriously, though, if they’re determined to be hostile, we are absolutely screwed. Hell, all they have to do is get within any reasonable distance of Earth and turn on their drive. It’d bake us all in very short order. So, Steph and I—and the rest of our team—are pretty much agreed that it’s a moot point. I mean, by all means, go ahead and work on your doomsday scenarios, but these guys are playing with more energy every second than the entire human race has ever used.”
There was silence around the table for a moment, then Alyosha chuckled. “Ah, well, we are all used to things on so much smaller a scale. Let us go on.”
“Very good,” said Olivia Davies, the United Kingdom representative. “Can we focus on our response, then? We’ve all been supplying information for communications strategies. Where are we with that?”
Sacco was pleased to see that despite everyone looking at Dr. Dobyns, York subtly nudged Stephanie Bronson to respond. She’s still adjusting to being the face of everything, but at least her team’s supporting her.
“Well . . . the idea of communicating with an alien intelligence is a pretty old one, and we’ve been going over not just the information and messages that the various countries would like to send, but the protocols for establishing communication. That’s really the most crucial, after all, since until they know how to talk to us, it doesn’t matter what messages we send.”
“That assumes they can’t figure out how to talk to us from what they’re receiving,” pointed out Adriana Suarez, the Brazilian representative. “They will have months of everything we’ve been broadcasting to analyze. Surely they will be able to understand us by the time they stop?”
Kurumada shook his head. “My apologies, but I do not believe so, Dr. Suarez. Perhaps our think-tank will feel differently, but it seems to me that there are so very many obstacles in the way of understanding our words from such transmissions.”
“That’s our feeling, yes,” Stephanie said after a brief discussion with the others on her team. “First, we’re transmitting on many bands, with multiple languages, in different modes and encoding schemes. How do you determine that what you’re receiving is someone’s voice? Maybe they don’t even have a concept of ‘voice’ the way we do. Maybe they don’t see the way we do. Written symbols are effectively arbitrary; they would need context to even try to interpret them, and they’d have no more context for us than we do for them. We’re pretty sure that they’d need to receive a systematic teaching transmission, one that’s clearly directed at them and that works through mathematical and scientific expressions before we attempt anything more complicated.”
Dr. Dobyns nodded. “Oh, if they were studying our transmissions ever since they could have picked them up, maybe, but at thirty percent of lightspeed I’m thinking that most of their sensors were shut down to protect them. A micrometeorite impact that you wouldn’t care much about at, say, twenty kilometers per second you will be really worried about at a hundred thousand kilometers per second.”
“But I thought space was basically empty,” Li Xiu Ying said. “Are impacts that common?”
“I’m afraid so. Oh, it’s emptier out between the stars than near our planet, but there’s still some gas and dust out there. The gas probably wouldn’t pose too much of a problem, but even very small particles of dust would be extremely dangerous,” Dobyns replied.
“Here’s an example,” Stephanie said. “If an average grain of sand—which masses less than point oh-five grams—were to hit this room at that speed, it would blow us and most of this building out of existence; the impact energy is about fifty-seven tons of TNT. From one grain of sand. So even very, very small pieces of dust could be chipping away pieces of your ship, and would certainly destroy any sensors you had out.”
“That sounds like over a hundred years it would do much damage, even if space is almost empty,” Alyosha said. “How did they survive?”
“Most designs for that kind of interstellar travel assume that the front of your ship is . . . well, ablative mass. A big, thick coating of rock or metal or ice that wears away, probably with embedded sensors to let you know if it takes a really big hit. I would not be surprised if, once Fenrir drops below a significant percentage of lightspeed, we’ll see a pretty large chunk of it just get ejected,” Stephanie said. She’d researched a lot of these questions as soon as she realized she was going to be the one in the spotlight.
She went on, “Exactly when they drop their big shield will tell us a lot about them.”
“Ah,” said Kurumada. “How tough their main ship is, yes?”
“Basically, yes.”
“All right,” Dr. Suarez said with a nod, “that makes sense. So, they’ve only had a short time—since they started slowing down, and probably had to at least take some readings on us to make sure everything was as they expected—to study our transmissions, so they won’t understand us. When will we be ready to transmit to them?”
“We’re working on that,” Dobyns said, “but honestly? We’ll want them to be a lot closer, otherwise we won’t be able to get any response data in reasonable time.” He pointed to another slide that showed transmission times. “Right now, turnaround time is something around two weeks, maybe a bit less now. Fenrir’s going to stop about two light-hours out, which is a lot more reasonable. Means we could expect several exchanges per day.”
“True,” Sacco said, studying the slide, “But it strikes me that we could get a head start simply by transmitting what amounts to the basic alphabet or whatever, constantly, in their direction.”
Kurumada nodded. “Yes. I agree. It would give them time to, first, sense that we were transmitting directly to them, and then learn whatever they could on the way in.”
“And also give us more time to find out if they want to talk,” Alyosha said with a wry grin. “Even with long delay times, they could still send us signal of ‘enough with the baby talk,’ yes?”
“Oh, certainly!” Stephanie said. “Which would tell us more about them. How fast they detect our transmission, how long it takes to decode it, and so on.”
Neysa Deshpande, the Indian representative, smiled briefly. “Not to be repetitive, but we are certain they have detected us? Because if they have not, then sending such a transmission will absolutely alert them, will it not?”
President Sacco saw Stephanie and York exchanging glances, and understood what they were thinking.
Stephanie grimaced. “Dr. Deshpande, there’s very little certain at this point; all we can do is make our best educated guesses, based on what we would expect we would, and could, do. And this close to Earth, there’s basically no way we would have missed noticing that Earth’s radiating in so many bands of the E-M spectrum in a way that just can’t be natural. So we have to assume they have seen us.”
Deshpande gave an apologetic shrug. “Our various citizens will all want us to be cautious. But I agree with your guess, for what it is worth. Let us start transmitting as soon as we have the, how should we say, lesson plan well mapped out.”
“I agree,” Kurumada said, and the other representatives echoed the sentiment.
“Pending the agreement of our superiors, of course,” Alyosha added. “Admittedly, any of us could begin transmitting on our own, but if we are to be coordinated . . .”
“Absolutely,” President Sacco said. “We do not intend to take any unilateral action at this time—but remember that time is limited, so I would hope you can get agreement from your governments quickly.”
“We will certainly try,” Olivia Davies said. “The issue of more direct contact will require a bit more discussion, I think.”
“That’s Wednesday’s conference,” Sacco said. “And yes, I think deciding if, how, and when we could launch something to physically greet them will take more discussion. But for now, I think trying to start a dialogue will be enough.”
And they’d better damn well want to have a dialogue, she thought as the representatives rose for a break.
Because if Fenrir didn’t want to talk, she doubted they’d be rolling out the welcome mat for a visit.