Space for Evolution

by Zurab Andguladze

  This question caused a general silence, which Lomo again ended: “Yes, why not, we definitely should learn what is going on. And in addition to it is also necessary to determine whether Ama’s screen is set up correctly. To do this, I think we need to attune two more screens, and place them on the central axis of the antenna if necessary during a new broadcast.”

  “And this will not distort the transmitted signal?” Im, a sturdy youth with round cheeks, asked. “I mean, if we put some object on the focus line?”

  Another speechless interval followed this question, and seemingly the colonists considered Lomo the reason for it. They clearly assumed that he should justify the expediency and accuracy of his proposal, looking at him with expectancy.

  In response, he said, “I hope we will not need to place the device exactly in the center of the beam.”

  “So let us check it.” Nim linked himself to the conversation. “Memi, you set up two UDs, mine and—” he didn’t finish the sentence, but looked around instead. His gaze rested on Fom.

  “My own,” said Fom, a slender, flexible young man. With these words, he unfastened the device from his wrist.

  “Now we will go to the barn and fetch the poles, so we do not have to climb on the roof to get close to the emitter,” Nim said.

  After that, he and Fom went around the stairs, approached the entrance, and brought their screens up, where Memi could take them. Then the young people headed to the water tower, where the colonists had built a warehouse two years previously. It could have been built of wood, like other buildings before, but at that time they’d wanted to test the reliability of bricks made with a mixture of clay and water—because in the near future, they would have to put the lander on supports made precisely of these building materials.

  Entering the barn, Nim and Fom immediately felt the absence of their screens—a rather thick darkness met them there, but what could they do? The young people had to be content with the remnants of light penetrating from the lamps outside. In the end, this lighting appeared enough for them, because they didn’t have to solve any difficult tasks. The young men just took two poles and a skein of leather cord.

  With these items in hand, they returned to the antenna. Here Nim tied the sticks and, instead of two lengths of three meters each, he had one six-meter pole. He then attached three tuned UDs to one of its ends.

  “Are there fixed time intervals between repeat sessions?” Daf specified.

  “Not for us. The receivers on Earth’s surface are located so that at least one of them will pick up our signal at anytime, whenever we send it,” Lome explained to her. “But still, according to the rule, we must repeat the session in eight hours.”

  Meanwhile, a new broadcast had begun. Fom lifted the screens mounted on the pole to the center of the antenna until they reached the axis of the parabola. The UDs remained silent. Soon the SOC-5 announced the successful completion of that séance too.

  The readings of various devices again contradicted one another. The time has come to ask the GPC-5 for advice.

  This time Arfina took over the communication with the computer, and the rest watched her dialogue through their screens. First, the girl chose “malfunctions,” then “connection,” and next she introduced a question in the dialog box of that window: “The SOC-5 confirms the emission of the radio signal in the direction of the solar system, but the UD tuned to receive this signal does not pick it up. What information should be considered reliable?”

  The machine replied: “You must connect the GPC-5 and the SOC-5 into a common network and check all sections of the line. If necessary, the LAI-5 must also be connected to this network, but not simultaneously. Only in turn with each of the previous ones. If these actions do not fix the issue, use another device to receive interstellar transmission.”

  “We have already used other screens, so we need to create a network and check the line.”Gimi said.

  Chapter 40

  Over the course of this conversation, Ama just silently listened to his comrades. Gradually, Arfina drew attention to him. “Ama, you initiated this illogical situation; what do you think of it now?”

  “The two questions made me think,” the youth answered. “We still do not know which device was wrong—the SOC-5 or the three screens. And, what I consider as the main, when it did happen—I mean, the malfunction of the SOC-5, if it happened at all.”

  “Is it really so important, the why of it?”Arfina asked, looking at him in slight surprise.

  Instead of an answer, Ama looked around and said, “I feel hungry. Let us eat and then I will tell you about my concern. Maybe it is just my misunderstanding.”

  Their meals consisted of four parts: breakfast at one o’clock, lunch at five, dinner at nine, and supper at fifteen. The preparation of the report had delayed the day’s supper, and as a result, the rest of his comrades also felt hungry. Therefore they accepted his proposal without objection.

  Shortly after they’d washed their hands and changed clothes, the young people gathered in the refectory. The three on duty—Efe, Guf, and Gimi—served warmed milk, honeyed corn pancakes, and apples. The dinner itself, like any meal, went about in almost complete silence. Having finished it, the youngsters remained at their tables. Arfina, sitting in the next row in front of Ama, turned back and reminded him of her question.

  The young man began to speak without any preliminary pondering on his words. Apparently, he had compiled his speech while eating.

  “I say, what if this broadcast really failed, and previous reports did not go through for a reason yet unknown to us?”

  “You think that this malfunction did not occur today, but a long time ago? Or do you think that it may have existed from the very first day?” asked Arfina, as perplexity gradually appeared on her face.

  “Yes, that is exactly what I said,” Ama confirmed.

  “So, maybe there has never been a signal from Neia?” Mafkona asked the same question.

  “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “What does that mean?” Mafkona, sitting at the table next to Arfina’s, continued to clarify the situation. “What consequences can this have for us?”

  At first silence met her questions, which lasted quite a while. Then Memi, who sat the closest to the stove, said, “I think it is too early to judge the consequences. First we need to establish which instrument is out of order. Let us implement the GPC-5’s tip and create a computer network. Do you all agree?”

  “I do not,” said Arfina without hesitation. “Let us assume that the combined computers have detected a technical malfunction. Then what? Are we going to eliminate it right now, at night?"

  “What are we going to do, then?" Fof asked her.

  “I think, first of all, we must learn what happened,” Arfina began to explain evenly. “If a signal has never been sent from here, what does it mean? Will they receive our messages later? Thirty-five years later? Is this delay important?”

  Dme, a youth with deep-set eyes, thick eyebrows, and a heavy chin, answered her, “As far as I remember, the SQP decree states that the earthlings must wait for a message thirty years after the landing of the ship.”

  “Landing?”Guf echoed.

  Dme nodded to her, “The landing is counted from the moment the lander enters orbit around the planet, to eighteen months after.”

  “And then?”Daf said. “I also do not remember all the details of this schedule.”

  “After these thirty years,” Dme continued, “there is another five-year reserve interval during which the energy source may provide the necessary power. If the expedition does not contact Earth during this time, it will be considered lost, and the observation of this stellar system will cease.”

  Im specified: “Dme, you said that ‘Observation will cease’. What did you mean? Can we not send a signal at anytime informing the earthlings that we exist?”

  Pausing for a several seconds, he shook his head, and then, tapping his fingers on the table, he explained his question, “Being imme
rsed in agronomy, I do not remember in detail the history of radio waves; I did not know that I needed to think about this, and so far, we have not had any reason to do so.”

  Instead of Dme now Lomo answered him: “We have a very small antenna and it transmits a weak signal. Their antenna is huge and transmits a powerful signal. Thus, we can receive their strong signal with our small antenna, and they can receive our weak signal with their giant antenna. However, since our signal is really weak after it reaches the solar system, it can only be received if their antenna is precisely aimed at us. But if this antenna, designed specifically for the SQP project, does not look in our direction, then other telescopes simply cannot register our translation. In this case, it will never be registered on Earth.”

  “What?”Omis asked in surprise. “You say that if, until today, we’ve never sent signals, then they will never know about our existence? Is that what you said?”

  “Are you sure, Lomo?” Mafcona shared Omis’s suspicion. “Do you mean that Neia will never make contact with Earth?”

  “Wait,” Lomo said calmly. “We must remember that we still do not know anything for sure; maybe a general check would show that everything is working normally and our last report is already a light hour from Neia.”

  “Moreover, we have not yet clarified the fate of the previous sessions,” Mafkona added.

  Memi listened to his comrades, and then said, “I want to propose the following plan: First—let us learn whether today’s broadcast really did not take place, or if the UDs simply cannot register it. Second—establish what happened to previous messages. Third—if necessary—find out when the deadline for transmitting a signal from our planet will come.”

  The Milky Way kindled brighter and brighter. According to the rules, the time had come when the young settlers had to put their places in order and prepare for bed, but this evening no one remembered it. The pioneers, despite their habit of always acting rationally, now faced an unexpected existential problem that forced them to forget their everyday routine.

  “I think Memi’s proposal should be implemented starting at the end,” Ifi said. “If the deadline has expired, everything else does not really matter right now. In such a case, there is no point in rushing to establish interstellar communication; it can be organized at anytime.”

  “If so, then let us find out when the last term for the message dispatching will elapse,” Arfina said in agreement. “Because if it really becomes necessary, as I said already, we cannot restore the line right now.”

  The girl looked around and saw that her planet-mates were expressing their consent by nodding.

  Chapter 41

  In the directory of the colonization plan, Arfina found the part called ‘Connection with the Earth’.

  “Here,” she said.

  The young people began to study the text depicted on their devices.

  “It turns out—” Daf spoke in a colorless voice ten minutes later, “Are we really late?”

  “I think,” Memi answered calmly, “we must re-read this file more carefully.”

  The colonists once again started to examine the text describing all the stages of their expedition. It read: “The fifth expedition will leave near-Earth orbit on November 30, 2145.”

  The list of dates concerning the acceleration of the ship, the sending of checking signals, and braking followed this introduction.

  Further on the schedule said, “The descent vehicle will land on the second planet of the star Rho in the constellation of Corona Borealis on January13 of 2401.”

  A list of actions according to which a colony should be developed followed this information. After these dates, the computer presented to them what they had used a few hours ago: report forms. The authors of the SQP project had made sure that their descendants on Earth would clearly understand the data sent from other planets.

  The last two paragraphs informed them: “The latest term until which the fifth expedition can send the first report to Earth is December of 2431. If conditions on the planet are optimal, and energy costs are minimal, this interval can be increased by another five years, until the December of 2436.

  Taking into account the distance of 56.21 light years between the planets, if no message is received on Earth by January 1, 2492, then the monitoring of the fifth expedition will be stopped and this mission will be declared lost."

  “Bind these terms to the present date?” The machine finished its report with a question.

  “Yes,” Arfina answered by pressing the touch button.

  “It takes 56 years and 97 days for the signal to reach Earth. A message sent right now will reach Earth on July 30, 2492; its delay in regard to the contact deadline would constitute 211 earth days or 180 Neian days.” theGPC-5 reported.

  Finished reading the last paragraph, guys and girls continued to peer at the text on their screen as though hoping that it would change its essence under their insistent look. The information remained the same but instead, step by step, they comprehended more and more clearly that something really bad was forming. The loss of contact with Earth wasn’t just bad news for them. Now it looked like the death of a living being, a phenomenon that couldn’t be undone or repeated.

  The Neians didn’t know anything about what parents were, what their love and support were. They unconsciously related these feelings to the entire humanity of Earth. Until this evening, subconsciously, they’d always compared themselves with distant humanity, keeping it in their hearts as an example to follow.

  The idea that they weren’t alone in that infinite universe had always supported them; that the new inhabitants of an unfamiliar planet weren’t just a small group of young, inexperienced and defenseless intelligent creatures trying to gain a foothold on a celestial body filled with alien life. No, from childhood they’d unknowingly believed that someone thought and worried about them, was ready to stand up for them.

  Of course, by reason they realized the senselessness of such hope, and didn’t expect any help from anyone, but nevertheless the idea itself had encouraged them. Now it turned out that they’d ceased to exist for their creators at all. Or rather, they’d never existed. No one would help the new colony even with belated advice; their hearts wouldn’t warm with the hope that someone in the boundlessness of space missed them.

  For the inhabitants of Earth, the fifth ship had disappeared somewhere on the approach to the star Rho, and therefore there was no one to feel regret about. Just that the apparatus had never reached its destination, or the conditions appeared to have been unsuitable on that planet, or something broke. Who knows what had happened to a rocket launched three hundred years ago? The main thing was that no one had suffered or died…

  “Have we checked this schedule to the end?” Ama resumed this silent confusion with the look of a man who was constantly thinking about some task. “Maybe we’ve missed something.”

  “The file with the base dates is not very large. What could we miss there?" Lomo answered him evenly.

  Ama cast a short glance at him, but said nothing. Instead, the young man took the UD off his wrist, lifted up its screen and stretched it to its largest size—to a rectangle with a diagonal of fifty centimeters. Then he put the device on the table and began to work. Seeing that, Dme also arranged the flexible pixels of his screen into a single layer and followed Ama’s example.

  Meanwhile, Jum, now a tall, wiry youth, attracted everyone’s attention, having got up and moved to the place where a blackboard had stood before. He glanced briefly at his two comrades, pressing the touch buttons on their screens, and said, “If our colony has indeed never sent any report to Earth, then we can now only hope that at least one of the other expeditions met with success and thus the SQP project still completed its task. On the other hand, we do not know this for sure, and this hope actually does not change anything in our situation.”

  “Exactly. That is why the rule says that we should act by considering all the other ships as failed, and we should try to make contact wi
th Earth, even if endangering our lives,” Hafa reminded him and her other comrades. Having said this, she ran her hand over her beige hair, almost invisible in the electric light.

  Ama and Dme listened to this chatter, and at the same time consistently checked the contents of the electronic folders. They were already rummaging through those that had nothing to do with either radio communications or terms.

  They didn’t find anything interesting until they came across a subfolder with the title of “Private offers.” The explanation for this catalog said that it contained a list of proposals that weren’t included in the main plan, and were collected merely for educational purposes. The list contained twenty-three files.

  After the two opened this folder, they found, for example, the proposal that the inhabitants of the earth should choose names for the first colonists; that the robots should try to domesticate some local animals, and not destroy the entire fauna; that the colonists should engraft earth plants upon local ones and so on. Each of these files contained instructions describing how to implement this proposal.

  Before long, they opened another file. The young men almost simultaneously got acquainted with its contents and, as soon as they understood its essence, they exchanged hopeful glances. Then Dme said loudly, “Look at your screens. I have opened this file to you too.”

  The young people immediately stopped talking and turned to their devices. There they found a document that told them, “If the Fifth Expedition does not establish contact with Earth within thirty-five years, then the waiting interval should be extended by another 216 days.”

  The following text explained the reason some members of the SQP project had initiated the private proposal containing that strange number of days. Its reason was an accident on the ISS, when an energy source had exploded there.

  Before the laboratory was left without energy, the scientists managed to inform Earth about the calamity. The powerless ISS could retain heat for no more than ten hours. The equipping and arrival of the rescue team would take at least twenty-four hours. Due to their ingenuity and courage, and a calculated risk, the rescuers arrived there much earlier.