Beyond the Event Horizon - Episode Four

by Albert Sartison

  “When it reached Jupiter, and decided to stay in its orbit after beginning the contact, we assembled the best brains on Earth to create a language in which we could communicate. I must give these remarkable people their due, they coped with this task excellently.

  “During the first contact, we discussed many subjects. Our scientists thought up numerous abstruse tests, the details of which you will find in your reports. I don’t know what you think, but to me, what our best minds are capable of is fantastic. They learned much more about the aliens than they wanted to reveal. We were in control of the situation throughout the time the dialogue was in progress. The aliens, without realising it, were dancing to our tune and revealing secrets about themselves.

  “After hearing of the alien ship for the first time, anyone would ask himself: what do they want? With what intentions did they come here? I was no exception. And from the very first minutes, from the very first sentences of our interracial dialogue, I knew that they had come to us as an advanced, humane civilisation to become our partner.

  “Regardless of my personal assessment, it has been proved with scientific precision during our scientific debates that the aliens are not our enemies. Their second visit, and their unexpectedly generous proposal, is also proof of this. They are our partners.

  “Their proposal to take us to a new level of development of civilization is the goodwill gesture of an elder brother stretching out his hand to help a younger one. By rejecting this outstretched hand, we are losing thousands of years of development of science, technology, the economy and civilisation.

  “Take a look at the street outside, where many thousands of educated, intelligent people have gathered. How can we, as representatives of the people, explain to them that by refusing this offer on the grounds of unjustified fears, we have taken from them the chance of seeing mankind advance into a new era, an era of unprecedented economic prosperity and technological development?

  “We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Our problem is not the aliens, our problem is fear of the unknown. We are shackled in our thoughts. We are thinking in the parochial mentality of an insignificant place among the stars, a big village called the Solar System. Let our decision give these people the chance to become part of a truly multi-global galactic family.

  “Thank you for your attention, and I hope you will make a wise decision.”

  Having finished, the president left the hall without saying a word until they were on board Space Force One. As soon as he was inside, he took off his jacket, throwing it carelessly over a chair, unfastened the top button of his shirt and slackened his tie, at once changing from the head of state into an ordinary man.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  The secretary frowned slightly.

  “Rather too much emotion. You were not addressing the voters, the deputies are just as much politicians as you are,” he replied. “They have the same allergy to empty rhetoric as you have, don’t forget that.”

  “Bullshit! I did everything right. When you’re making a speech you can sense how the hall feels. It was on my side.”

  “You know best, you were the one speaking. Where are we going?”

  “Is there any urgent business?”

  “No.”

  “Then let’s go home.”

  6

  While working on ‘Dawn’, Steve, to his surprise, had got into the habit of anticipating important calls from Clive, and having just woken up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, he was surely about to receive one now. There was complete silence in the room. Suddenly, the tablet lying on the night table winked. Steve chuckled, and threw a glance at the clock on the wall. It showed half past three in the morning. If he was being called that late, it must be important. He was wide awake at once, and gave the command to make the connection.

  “Hi, Steve, I reckon I’ve dug something up,” cried Clive excitedly as soon as the connection was made.

  “And good evening to you too,” replied Steve. “This time Shelby will carry out his threat, I hope you’re bearing that in mind.”

  “What threat?”

  “That if you don’t stop digging up all sorts of problems, he won’t let you use the telescope.”

  “Stop playing the fool. This is about the gravity anomaly or, more precisely, the portal.”

  Steve switched on the light and picked up his tablet to see Clive’s face. The portal and everything connected to it interested him more than anything else. Even the aliens themselves were not as interesting as their mysterious portals. The very idea that they gave access to another dimension delighted him and, at the same time, drove him out of his mind.

  “Have you dug up how it works?”

  “No, but I’ve found something more interesting than that. It seems the aliens are playing on a really grand scale.”

  “Just tell me, don’t drag it out.”

  “When we were next to the portal, we took the signature of gravity waves, remember?”

  “Of course, so what?”

  “And after that we began to look for portals all over the galaxy.”

  “Well? Chris and his team were dealing with that, weren’t they? The gravity detectors they have on the Moon are the best there are. Oh, wasn’t today the day they planned to complete the scan? What’s the date?”

  “That’s right, yes. Today is the day they planned to end the work and they succeeded. I got the data this evening.”

  “And as always, you began analysing them yourself, didn’t you? You couldn’t wait for me, of course.”

  Clive always did that, although he knew Steve couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t fair on Steve that he always looked at the most interesting data on his own.

  “I was going to wait until tomorrow so that we could both...”

  “Oh yes, that’s what I thought.”

  “...but I couldn’t wait, so I took a quick look at them.”

  Steve picked up his watch from the night table and, turning the tablet camera towards it, demonstratively pointed to the time.

  “It’s half past three in the morning. I didn’t know you needed six hours to ‘take a quick look’. When did they send the data, about ten p.m., I suppose?”

  “At a quarter to seven. Well... do you want to know what I found, or are you going to keep on whining?”

  “OK, what have you got?”

  “When we found the first portals after our own, we had a working hypothesis that they were in colonised star systems. And this was indeed true of the first portals. But today, I came across others; I’ve counted four of them altogether, but there could be even more. We’ll have to determine their exact positions. So, these four are near stars that have no planetary systems.”

  Steve thought for a minute, trying to find a logical explanation.

  “Perhaps they’re still inhabited. There could be some sort of artificial space structures there...”

  “Artificial planets so light that we can’t register them?”

  “We can’t observe exoplanets on the other side of the galaxy directly, we have to determine their presence by indirect methods. Artificial structures are too light for such methods.”

  “It’s logical, but... no. Look for yourself. I started by marking all the portals on the map. You can see that they are scattered at random all over the galaxy. Here, there, there... The nearest one to us is in the Gliese 581 system...”

  “The aliens told us themselves that they have a colony there. I’d be surprised if it didn’t have a portal.”

  “That’s right. But look at the map.”

  Clive’s face disappeared from the screen and was replaced by a map of the galaxy with the portals’ locations marked on it. Steve studied the map carefully.

  “But there is something systematic about it,” he said eventually, after some thought. “They obviously prefer the periphery of the galaxy.”

  “Yes, I noticed that too, but that’s understandable. The centre of the Milky Way is too active and has a lot
of short-lived stars. It’s logical, but... it’s not interesting. There’s something more interesting. Look at this...”

  The image of the Milky Way turned till it was almost on its edge.

  “Are you looking carefully?”

  “Yes, of course I am, get on with it.”

  “OK, now I’ll remove all the portals, leaving only a few which have something in common.”

  Most of the portals disappeared from the image. Steve tried to work out what Clive was getting at, but nothing occurred to him.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” he said eventually.

  “Yes, that’s because the viewing angle is not what it should be. But look now...”

  The image of the galaxy turned through ninety degrees, giving Steve a view from above. The next second, he stopped breathing and quickly sat up in bed.

  “Have you shown it to Shelby yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I’ll be with you in ten minutes. We’ll have to recheck the coordinates before we press the panic button.”

  “Fine, I’ll wait.”

  7

  In recent weeks, the excitement had been building slowly but surely. The wait for the preliminary assessment by the three groups of experts, then the debates in Parliament and finally MacQueen’s warning, had all culminated in causing the president such unease that yesterday he had decided to postpone all his business and spend the rest of the day waiting for the decision, left to his own reflections.

  Space Force One took him to his home, which, as if especially for the occasion, was totally empty. The family members had gone off to do their own thing and his wife had left him a note on the table, saying she wouldn’t be back till the next day.

  John undressed, opened a bottle of beer and, with a sigh of relief, plunged into a hot bath. He dimmed the light and contentedly stretched out to his full length. The silence, broken only by the gentle splashing of the water, quickly relieved the tension, which gave way to tiredness.

  When his desire for sleep began to put him at risk of falling asleep right there in the bath, he decided to get out, dry himself, wrap himself in a plaid throw and move to the settee, not forgetting first to fetch another bottle of beer from the refrigerator. He picked up a book and ran his eyes over a few paragraphs, then his head fell onto his chest.

  John was awakened by the early morning sun’s rays shining directly into his face, preventing him from dropping back off to sleep. He opened his eyes and looked around him. The next second, recalling the previous day, he looked at the clock on the wall. It was 09:45, which meant that Parliament would have taken its decision by now. It was stipulated in the agenda that the debates on this question would end no later than 05:00.

  He took his tablet from the magazine table and opened his mail.

  PROJECT ACCEPTED, 75.1% FOR, 20% AGAINST. CONGRATULATIONS!

  John gave a sigh of relief. It was only just over the threshold, but the main thing was that it had been passed. If the project had remained secret up to now, it would surely not have got through. He gestured lazily for a connection to his secretary.

  A few seconds later, he heard his secretary say: “Good morning, John.”

  “A good morning indeed. Have the aliens been told yet?”

  “Yes. Our negotiators have been discussing the details for four hours now.”

  “No more surprises, I hope?”

  “It seems not. Do you want to talk to them?”

  “Yes, put me through.”

  “Just a second.”

  Silence fell. While waiting for the connection, the president, grunting, got up and went into the kitchen.

  Pouring himself a glass of cold milk, he switched on the television. With the sound off, he quickly looked through the main news channels. Everywhere, discussions about Parliament’s decision were going on, and demonstrations by supporters and opponents of the project were being shown. The president switched off the TV when his tablet became active again.

  “Mr. President, this is Stern, the chief negotiator of the group.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Stern. How are things going? What’s the mood?”

  “It’s going very well, Mr. President. The aliens don’t like beating about the bush, we are rapidly moving ahead on the main issues.”

  “Good, that’s very good. Mr. Stern, I’d like to know when they plan to start the construction. Have you discussed that yet?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. That was the first thing we decided. The aliens are ready to start as soon as the main details are settled.”

  “That’s fine, I like such promptness. How will the construction proceed?”

  “It will be done in stages, beginning with the deployment of a temporary structure to supply energy for the building work until the main sphere is ready and able to take on this task. This temporary structure will be in the form of a hemisphere and will be near the Sun, close to the orbit of Mercury.”

  “That’s within Earth’s orbit, isn’t it? It won’t shield us from the Sun’s light, I hope?”

  “No, no, Mr. President, don’t worry. The hemisphere will be, if I can so express it, to the north of the plane in which the planet rotates. It will only trap radiation which would have gone off into space anyway and been lost to the planets of the Solar System.

  “I must warn you, though, that screening the Sun’s radiation over such a large area could lead to perturbations in the asteroid belt. In the long term, the expense of anti-asteroid protection will rise somewhat because solar radiation exerts a little pressure on heavenly bodies. In the case of small bodies like asteroids, this influence is sufficient, over many years, to move them from their previous orbit towards the centre of the Solar System.

  “But I repeat, there will not be any significant increase in the danger from asteroids. The radiation-screened zone only touches the asteroid belt at a tangent. Nothing dramatic.”

  “What about their technology? Are they willing to pass it on to us?”

  “No, sir. They insisted that there will be no transfer of technologies, neither regarding the building of the temporary hemisphere, nor that of the subsequent complete sphere. Our ships are not allowed to approach the body of the sphere closer than 300,000 km. They say it could be dangerous for the ships themselves.

  “But the aliens have agreed to make several important recommendations about our remote manipulation technology, because it is needed for the creation of artificial gravity after the excavation of planetary rock. Without it, we shall not be able to implement the project.”

  “If we don’t know the structure of the sphere, then who will maintain and repair it? Or are they giving a half-billion-year guarantee?”

  “It is capable of maintaining itself; it does not require any intervention.”

  “But how can we fly beyond it if we are not allowed to approach it? I’m talking about the permanent sphere, not the temporary one.”

  “Yes, Mr. President, I understood you. The sphere will have locks of some sort.”

  “Locks? How will that work?”

  “All the surfaces of the sphere will have a number of something like closed-end funnels leading out. Ships can pass out through them unhindered, without approaching the surface of the sphere itself.

  “Mr. President, due to the power of this structure, strong magnetic fields will be induced on its surface, so the safety argument is not without justification. There is at least a grain of truth in it.”

  “It doesn’t sound very reliable, having to pass through some kind of funnel.”

  “Actually they will be huge, from three to five million kilometres in diameter, so there’s no need to worry about having enough room. A whole planet could easily pass through them. Not only Earth, but even Jupiter.”

  “OK. Mr. Stern, I would like you to raise the subject of technology transfer again.”

  “We can try, Mr. President, but I doubt if anything will come of it. They said ‘No’ quite firmly.”

  “All right, we�
��ll get back to that. Who will observe the construction?”

  “The astrophysicists, Professor Shelby’s team. And of course our fleet, just as a precaution.”

  “Well then, Mr. Stern, thank you for your excellent work. When do you intend to complete the negotiations?”

  “I think we’ll be finished by this evening. We’re making rapid progress. It’s quite nice doing business with them.”

  8

  “General,” began Shelby, “do you remember our discussion during the aliens’ first visit, about their motives?”

  “There were many discussions. Which one do you have in mind?”

  “When we thought a lot about a question to which we never really found a satisfactory answer: why did the aliens need to build a sphere in our star system in particular?”

  The general nodded.

  “One of the most interesting questions.”

  “We think we have found the answer.”

  “Excellent. I hope their motives are peaceful?”

  “I think we have discovered the technical point of this whole project with the sphere.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Well, first you must remember what happened when we sent the expedition to the anomaly. When my lads got there, they noticed that the anomaly was a sort of exit from a tunnel in hyperspace, through which the aliens could move rapidly. In our space-time continuum, the anomaly takes the form of a tesseract or, if you like, a four-dimensional analogue of a three-dimensional cube.

  “The tesseract does not stay motionless in one place, but rotates around a certain axis. My lads assumed that the axis of its rotation was not chosen at random, but showed where the tunnel leads.

  “It turned out that it was pointing to star systems which are good candidates for the occurrence and existence of intelligent life. Furthermore, with the aid of the work done by the research group that studied the anomaly, we were able to study thoroughly the signature of the entrance to the portal, enabling us to discover similar portals in other parts of our galaxy.

  “We found several dozen such signatures of gravitational waves, which in our opinion indicate the location of other portals.”