“What does that mean?” His interlocutor asked with slight surprise. “Could you please explain?”
“Sure,” the man began with an almost imperceptible sigh. “After the supernova explosions, we, the scientific communities of different states, virtually met to discuss further actions, including with regard to the SQP.”
“And the result of this meeting was…” the journalist intervened with an unfinished question.
“Through the media, we turned to the amateur astronomers of the world. We offered an opportunity to them to continue monitoring at their own expense. For this purpose, we have allocated one radio telescope belonging to the SQP and located in northern Scandinavia, although it needs a little repair,” the scholar said.
“Why exactly this one? Because it is broken?” with a smile that looked ironic, the host asked. “Why at their expense?”
“The failure of this object means nothing,” the guest explained. “It’s easy to fix, and the scientific community will pay for the work. The case is that the star Rho, to which this expedition was headed, is circumpolar at that latitude, that is, throughout the year it is constantly in the radio-visibility zone of this antenna. Thus, it alone is quite enough for observation.”
“There is nothing to be done, so it’s good that at least the illusory hope remains,” the announcer began, but her interlocutor interrupted her in a sad voice. “No hope.”
The woman looked at him in surprise, and the man continued, “It is the answer to your second question about how life itself stopped this project. So, our appeal to amateur astronomers appeared to be useless. Literally, no one showed a desire to sustain the SQP for just a couple of months! It could be said that we, who are only scientists, didn’t dare to close such a grandiose project, and instead we said let those who wish to do it do so at their expense, and not only verbally or at the expense of taxpayers.”
The host raised her eyebrows in surprise, but it was unclear to what information she responded in this way—to the closure of the project itself or to this appeal to the public.
Meanwhile, the scientist continued without stopping, “Of course, it is difficult for one person to maintain the telescope, but they could create some kind of alliance to raise money. However, as I said, no one answered our plea. For my colleagues and I this was a clear demonstration of the fact that people don’t believe in ghosts and don’t want to pay for what they already know no longer exists. No one wants to be the object of derision. In any case, this is exactly what I had in mind when I said that life itself demanded the completion of this project.”
“Yes, what a pity,” the journalist agreed with him. “So much effort, a unique attempt…”
It was clear that the presenter was sincerely upset. After a barely noticeable pause, she said, “I thought… really, how differently my brain would work if I knew that people lived somewhere on a distant planet. How I would have liked to know about their affairs, about what their life is like! How do they look, what is valuable to them?”
Here an unexpected thought pricked Medea and distracted her from the telephone. She asked herself a question: while this woman was so sorry for this project, what then should she feel about it herself? After all, it was not the ancestors of this journalist, but her own ones who had served it from the very beginning.
“In short,” said the man, left alone in the frame, “and unfortunately, we’re witnesses to and contemporaries of one of the biggest disappointments in history.”
“Oh, yes, it’s impossible to disagree with you,” the woman said thoughtfully, “but what can I say? Thank you very much for the interesting conversation, although actually we didn’t learn anything joyful.” The camera moved away, and the presenter reappeared on the screen.
Instead of answering, the guest simply spread his hands and nodded.
“And now,” the journalist turned back to the lens and continued to speak, “our colleagues from the meteorological service will tell you the weather forecast.”
“Medea, it’s time. Would you please sit in my chair?” the hairdresser invited her.
The woman sat in front of the mirror. It reflected a narrow face with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and sagging, wrinkled skin. Nothing unusual, all in accordance with the appearance of a woman of seventy-five years.
“How bad these modern mirrors are,” Medea said.
“But this is very good one,” the stylist protested softly. “Its surface has a special plating that—”
“Not only is this mirror a bad one,” Medea interrupted her. “All the others are no better. And cameras are just as bad these days. In my youth, the equipment was adequate—mirrors showed me such a good face! And the photos were nice, too!”
The stylist got the joke and smiled sincerely.
Chapter 49
Senile vision is bad, especially in the evening. Medea had long known this. In addition, when the day dies and the darkness paints the world in an absolutely impenetrable color, you are forced to stop activities in your yard and return to your home. This is the time when the television and the network try to become your best friends.
That night, she switched the TV channels one by one and didn’t find anything attractive, as usual. She was already considering washing up and going to bed a bit earlier, when at the last moment she remembered what she’d heard that day at the hairdresser.
Medea involuntarily started to meditate, and almost immediately recalled the most important news contained in that talk—that they were going to abolish an enterprise that had been operating for four centuries. On the other hand, what should they do if the rocket showed no signs of life? How long should the wait last? How many more centuries? Especially when they needed their telescopes to watch an astronomical miracle. However, literally the next moment, Medea realized that in fact they hadn’t closed anything.
Now she sat in the living room of their house and was supposedly watching TV, although actually she had long been distracted from the events taking place on the screen. Finally, she took the remote control and turned off the device. Then she got up from her chair, went to the neighboring room and switched on the computer there.
Soon after, Medea, already sitting at the table, was reading the latest news related to the SQP project. An hour or so later, the elderly woman tore her tired eyes from the monitor and thought for a while. Through the window, she glanced at the veranda of their one-story house. Despite the coolness of the evening, her husband was still there repairing some mechanism.
She stood up, opened the window and said to her husband, “Johan, are you very busy? Do you have time to talk?”
“Yeah, why not?” he answered in a second. “I’ll gather this up and wash my hands.”
The man collected the parts of the scattered device lying around him on the floor and placed them in a plywood box standing at his right hand. A few minutes later, with washed hands, he entered the room. He looked inquiringly at his wife and went to the sofa with its greenish upholstery, standing against the right wall. He sat on it and leaned against its back. Medea’s husband was a large man with a square face, the main feature of which was a perfectly trimmed gray mustache, covering the entire territory from mouth to nose.
She turned around in her swivel chair and without a preface asked her spouse, “Do you know the current status of the SQP project?”
"What?" an expected incomprehension appeared on Johan’s face.
“Space for Evolution,” his wife explained.
“Ah, Space, of course, I know—” her husband began to agree, although he immediately changed his mind, "no, actually, I should confess that I don’t know what is happening there, especially today." He raised his hands.
“So you don’t know that this project is ceasing to exist?” Medea specified.
"Uh… what I heard, some time ago, was that they intended to close it." Johan spoke hesitantly. “Have they changed their minds? Will they wait longer? Although what exactly are you talking about?” He asked, being in the
end surprised at this strange beginning.
“They won’t wait. They decided to end it next week,” Medea looked at her husband with expectation in her eyes.
Johan thought for a moment, then straightened his mustache and asked patiently, “Will it be closed only in our country? What about in others?”
“They’re going to do it together. Since, in the twenty-first century, all countries jointly launched the Space for Evolution project, so now, in the twenty-fifth century, we should end it together too, they’ve declared,” Medea explained.
“Well, there’s nothing to be done. It seems the time has come and they know what they are doing,” the man said, and after a moment he remembered, “Was that all you wanted to tell me?”
“Not really,” Medea bit her upper lip, looked at her husband, took a deep breath, and since it was impossible to speak during inhalation, she resumed speaking in parallel with her exhalation: “I want us to continue the SQP project.”
After these words, silence fell in their office-room. Johan stared at his wife in disbelief. But when he realized that she wasn’t joking, he said in a patronizing tone, “You see, tomorrow morning you’ll wake up rested and will throw this nonsense out of your head. Especially when you remember that all our lives we worked as economists, not as astronomers or, at least, as millionaires.”
“We don’t need to be either to take up this business!” Medea said confidently.
This time Johan looked at his wife more closely. “Are you serious? What are you talking about, Medi? What does it mean ‘to take up’? Do you think that the astronomical… uh, a telescope is just an attraction and any visitor can have fun with it?”
“Not every visitor,” his sarcastic tone didn’t affect Medea. In spite of it, over the course of the next half hour, she told him everything she had heard before at the hairdresser, and then read on the net at home.
By the end of her story, Johan had already realized that the matter had taken a really serious turn. He understood that the situation demanded from him an extraordinary effort to distract his wife from this strange idea, to show her the absurdity of her belief that they really could deal with a business completely outside of their financial, educational, intellectual or any other ambit. At the same time, Johan failed to quickly figure out how to arrange this most convincingly.
After a moment of confusion, he decided to just start with something: “As you said a minute ago, initially three devices monitored the signal of this ship, and now, it turns out, just one is enough. If a single telescope was capable of doing this, then why have the three of them tracked the ship before? How did you believe such a blatant lie?”
“At that latitude,” she replied, “the star Rho is constantly visible all year round. This is called a circumpolar star."
“Wasn’t this star a citru... a circumpolar or whatever until today?” Johan asked skeptically.
His wife replied patiently and with a warm smile on her face, “I can explain it to you; I have read a lot today, but wait a minute.”
With these words Medea got up and left the room. Johan accompanied her with a worried look. Soon, his wife returned with a tray in her hands, carrying on it a carafe with fruit juice and two glasses. The woman laid her load on the table next to the computer, and then poured the orange liquid into both glasses. She handed one of them to Johan, and from the other she sipped her drink.
“So,” she resumed her explanation, “during a space mission there is always a spare communication line. The SQP is also not just an astronomical observation but also a mission outside Earth. Therefore, backup channels must exist for communication with its facilities. That is why three telescopes observed each expedition in three time zones, separated by eight hours. Initially, eighteen radio telescopes were deployed for this Project, uniformly distributed around the globe.”
“Then why are they breaking such an important rule now?” Johan tried to approach the issue from the other side, but immediately answered his own question. “Oh, yes, if they are going to close this project, then the rules have no importance anymore.”
Here the old man, as if recalling something, thought for a second, then looked at his wife and asked, “What did you say? Where is this antenna located?”
“It’s in the north, at the seventy-fifth latitude,” his wife told him.
This clarification apparently confirmed to Johan the accuracy of his assumption. “Wait, I think I know what place you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” the woman met his words with a grin, “For more than a century, my ancestors watched spacecraft from this antenna. At that time, all the expeditions were on the way. Maybe now I would also be on duty there if it weren’t for my grandmother, who followed her husband here, to South Africa.”
Hearing this, Johan felt uneasy, because, finally, he understood in full—his wife had not just conceived something, but this something was her connection with her ancestors. That was why she is so determined.
Things were getting more complicated every second, but he wasn’t going to give up. “Medi, I remember that many of your ancestors were involved in the SQP project, but other people also served it. And now everyone admits that it has ended. Why do you think that you need it more than others, or do you think you owe anything to anyone?”
After a short pause, he put forward another thought: “Think of it, can this be done with the help of our modest means, if all of humanity appears to be unable to do this?”
“We will only do what we can,” his wife said confidently.
“Tell me, do you know what result this venture will bring us?” The old man asked sharply, and jumped to his feet with an agility not appropriate to his age. He began to walk back and forth, gesturing frantically while talking. A long strand of hair that usually covered his bald head, now hung along his left ear and swayed to the beat of his steps.
“I can tell you what will happen as a result of it: we will go bankrupt and we will beg for help from our children so as not to starve to death!” He was almost screaming already.
Medea responded to his terrible prophecy with impenetrable silence. Johan waited a little, but when he saw that his wife wasn’t going to speak, he realized that wrath wouldn’t give him anything. His big words had bounced off his wife’s consciousness and left no trace there, like a ball in fine weather, reflected from the crossbar of a football goal. The man calmed himself by willpower, and after a short internal debate, this time he decided to resort to the help of numbers. It was always difficult to argue against them.
“Ok. Tell me what you mean by saying we will do what we can? How much will it cost, how long can we maintain this SQP with our money?”
The woman thought. Then she looked at her husband, warmly smiled at him and said, “Bankruptcy isn’t mandatory. After all, we’ve never counted how much money we need to reach the end without any problems, right?”
“What didn’t we calculate, what end do you mean?”
“Listen to me. We have retirement savings that we live on. How do you know that they will end on the day of our death? I offer to spend only that money on the SQP, that we won’t have time to spend in our lifetime,” Medea said these words with such a sweet expression, as if offering to dig a flowerbed up tomorrow.
Johan stopped in the middle of the room and stared at Medea, mouth agape with surprise. This went on for quite some time. Perhaps the old man was trying to understand the true essence of her words, and it seemed he didn’t mind that they were a real offer, not a joke.
Indeed, in the next moment he began to shake his head and speak with a wry grin. “So you suggest… hmm, that we spend only the extra money?”
“Exactly,” his wife spoke placidly. “But there is a small obstacle—no one will inform us about the date after which we won’t be bothered by electricity bills. If we could know this now, we would calculate how long we can extend the SQP and thus would answer your question.”
“Who could we ask about this? Do you know anyone who knows about thi
s date?” now Johan, completely relaxed, asked with a chuckle. His mood had changed noticeably, and the impression was that the only feeling he was experiencing now was curiosity.
Medea replied, “Sure, it is useful to know how long our remaining life will last, but it seems we should calculate this by ourselves. Aren’t we economists?”
“Hahaha!” Johan laughed out loud in response.
He returned to the sofa and sat on it, spreading his hands on its back. After a short pause, he grinned again and started considering, “You know, this is really cool. Didn’t you tell me a few minutes ago that no one wanted to pay for the SQP? So, imagine what noise would begin when we announce our intention! Especially when we inform the public that we’ve calculated how much of our money will outlive us, hahaha!” He burst into laughter again.
Now Medea stared at her husband in bewilderment. In the meantime, he continued with a laugh, “Let’s foresee every aspect. What if we are lucky?”
“What aspects, what do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean the following: what if aliens deliberately drag out the time, to make their appearance more sensational? After all, they also know about timing,” with a wide smile on his face, he explained to his wife.
“And then?” the woman hastened him.
“Here is my plan,” the man continued. “We pay for the prolonging of the SQP and in return we demand the right to be the first to inform humanity about aliens, and to the end of our days be… uh, the official representatives of another planet… and so on!”
“Johan, what do you mean by ‘official representatives’? Do you think this is something like an online conference?” This time, the woman had doubts about her intention, as if they had changed roles.
“I don’t care if this is an online conference or an online congress. Now the main thing is to contact those in charge of this telescope and arrange the formalities,” Johan said, without any sign of hesitation.
First, Medea silently looked at her husband. Then she squinted and asked, “Then let’s speculate what time interval we can buy, what do you think?”
Space for Evolution Page 21
