It wasn’t the solitude, and the danger he was in certainly had nothing to do with it, either. Ever since the AI had been commanded to change the route he’d felt like a tool. No, worse. He felt completely at someone else’s mercy.
If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he had been a puppet for a very long time now—ever since the conglomerate guys had captured him on Sisyphus three years ago. It would have been wiser to go to jail for that, even if it would have cost him eight or ten years of his life, and if he could have been sure they would not have simply shot him. Now he had sold his life to the RB Group. On Mercury it had felt like he was self-determined, but that had been more self-deception than anything else.
Sobachka came to him and stroked his legs like a cat. She sensed his pensive mood and wanted to comfort him. Artem bent down and ruffled her fur, praising her for cleaning the wall so nicely. He returned to his captain’s seat. The new route had one advantage in that they had gravity for most of the way. Recently he had developed bad feelings about zero g. Perhaps it was time to go back to Earth where he had not been since ten years ago. He wondered if a lot had changed, especially since the near catastrophe back in ‘71. Not that there was much point in thinking about Earth. It wasn’t like he was going to return—anywhere, ever.
Artem sat down and pulled up current data. The temperature display was giving him a headache. They were getting closer to the sun’s corona, with temperatures of a few million degrees. Normally that would not be an issue since density was so very low out here. In other words, there were extremely energetic particles out here, but very few of them. The faster the yacht went, however, the more of these particles the ship would hit in a given time period, and the hotter it would get. The shield didn’t help much since it had been designed to protect the ship from the side in final orbit, shielding them from the radiation coming out of the sun. They had dismissed the corona, since initial plans had projected him traveling much more slowly than the current reality.
The sensors showed 570 degrees for the tip of the capsule and 610 degrees at the front of the shield. So far it wasn’t an issue. But they hadn’t yet reached the main part of the corona. The material of the spaceship was made to withstand atmospheric re-entry, so it could withstand 2,500 degrees without significant damage. But Artem didn’t want to test the limits. Was there any chance to reduce the strain on the material? He needed a vacuum that sucked up the particles heading for the yacht. A snowplow would be even better. The key issue was hydrogen kernels—protons—with some electrons, too. Their electrical charge was something they had in common. That was a big advantage: An electromagnetic field would influence them. Just moving some of them out of the way would provide relief. But where would he get a magnetic field? He knew it shouldn’t matter to him, since he was going to die anyway, but he was not yet ready to give up entirely.
Artem scratched the stubble on his chin. He loved such problems—they gave him the feeling that he wasn’t completely powerless. How about putting an electrical charge on the outer skin of the hull? That would hardly suffice. Earth protected itself from solar winds by rotating its metallic core to create a magnetic field. The resulting field lines told the solar particles how to move around the Earth. He needed something like that, but the Earth wasn’t a perfect model. Magnetic particles came too close to the North and South Poles.
He had to consider where to place the poles on the yacht. The drive was least affected by heat and radiation by design but then the other pole would be at the tip of the capsule where things were hottest already. Things would be perfect if no part of the ship would get particularly hot. The magnetic field would need to rotate to spread the load over various parts of the ship as the poles moved across it.
That was feasible. Artem pushed himself out of the seat. Sobachka looked at him. She seemed to expect a walk. Could she be aware that they were in the middle of space? Could a dog understand something like that? He gave her a command to lie down and she obeyed, as she had been trained to do.
“Good dog.” Artem walked around his seat. Halfway to the table there was a round trapdoor in the floor. The cabin had a lower level where tools and supplies were stored. There wasn’t much free space, but the construction he had in mind did not need much room. He needed a conducting loop. And a source of current, of course.
Artem opened the trapdoor and the light came on automatically. It is really tight down here! How would he set his conducting loop in motion? Did he actually need to do that? It might be enough to slowly rotate the yacht around its own axis! He just had to make sure the loop was not exactly perpendicular to the ship’s axis.
He descended through the trapdoor into the cellar. There was a short ladder, but he had to be careful not to bump into crates and containers. There was a rudimentary workbench in a corner. The perfect circuit for his purposes would be a superconductor, which would give him maximum field strength with little investment.
“Computer, do we have any spare part on board that contains a superconducting circuit?”
“The spare cooling module for the drive unit has a superconducting coil.”
“Can you explain to me how to remove it without damaging it?”
“Of course, Artem. But be warned, we only have the one replacement on board.”
“How high is the probability of a defect of this component?”
“That depends on the load of the drive and its temperatures. The MLBF is at 5,000 hours.”
So on average the cooling module was out of service every 5,000 hours. “Relative to the actual use of the drive, I assume?” posited Artem.
“Yes, and relative to normal conditions—which we do not have while flying through the solar corona.”
“That is a risk I need to take. If I don’t do anything about the heat, this ship will never reach 5,000 operating hours.”
“That is a realistic assessment,” said the AI.
“Let’s go to work, then.”
And his favorite T-shirt was dirty again! Artem was angry with himself. I should have taken it off earlier! But the circuit was in place. It didn’t look like a regular electrical installation, or even a circle, because he’d had to stick to the space the cellar provided. But that didn’t matter, as long as current was flowing.
Sobachka awaited him at the opening, panting with eagerness. She was probably hungry again, but she would have to wait some more. He needed to try out his construction first. He could ask the AI to do it for him, but that would take away from his satisfaction. He wanted to be the one to press the button. Artem sat down and pulled the screen toward him.
He opened a schematic of the yacht, which showed him where to control electricity, air, water, etc. He had connected his magnetic field dynamo to an unused spare line. The superconducting material let him use very high currents, leading to correspondingly high magnetic fields. But cooling the superconductor and maintaining the magnetic field consumed large amounts of energy. The yacht’s drive generated energy from the surplus heat. There was enough right now but the supply was not boundless. He had to find the best compromise between straining yacht reserves and having strong protection.
Artem tapped the button hesitantly to release the lowest possible current. He looked up and saw that the light did not go out, nor did it even flicker. Good news—no short circuit. He increased the current slowly but steadily. There was no magnetic sensor on the hull, so he would only see results when the temperature decreased.
“Computer, start rotating the ship. One turn every ten minutes.”
“Confirmed,” said the AI.
He had to wait. Outside, an invisible shield was now protecting the yacht, gracefully guiding the subatomic particles around the yacht. The stronger the field, the better the protection. He increased the current somewhat more. The energy supply remained positive. Artem tapped the armrest with his fingers. Several minutes passed. He switched to display the temperature readings.
Yes! It’s working! The tip of the capsule reported
569 degrees and the trend was pointing downward. Now his hopes rested on the cooling module staying online as long as he would need it. Later, once they crossed the corona, the temperature would drop from millions of degrees back down to a comfortable 5,000 degrees. Plasma density, however, would increase, and he did not know what that would mean for the yacht.
Artem leaned back and sighed. One problem at a time. Right now he had a couple hours to rest. He closed his eyes. Then he remembered that he needed to feed Sobachka. Sighing again, he stood up and took care of his duties. Then he laid back down to rest. Finally he would be able to catch some sleep.
“May I interrupt briefly?” asked the AI.
“Not really, I wanted to…”
“I am receiving electromagnetic pulses that one could interpret to be a radio signal,” interrupted the AI.
“From where?” Stupid question, Artem realized before the second word left his tongue. He wiped sudden beads of sweat from his forehead. The AI would not have phrased it so weirdly if something terrestrial had been the source.
“From the alien structure.”
“Maybe they are for somebody else?”
“Unlikely. The pulses are sent with a kind of directional radio signal.”
May 28, 2074, Solar Explorer
The sun is a monster. That became clearer and clearer to Alain Petit the closer they got. His favorite pastime was to staff the little telescope that was part of Heather’s responsibility. But for her it had to be less impressive, since she had years on the DKIST under her belt. So most of the time, Alain could use it for whatever he felt like doing.
Alain was very happy with the situation. Spending time looking at the wonders of the solar surface prevented him from feeling useless. He liked to stay out of the way. English wasn’t his mother tongue, so just listening to the Americans’ banter was strenuous to him, and the others had often changed topics before he had been able to put together what he wanted to add to the now-bygone topic. So, except for one-on-one conversations, he mostly limited his interactions to the official meetings where Amy ensured that everyone had their say and was given time to express themselves.
He was grateful to be on the expedition, regardless. Normally he would sit alone all day in his apartment. He would analyze solar imagery coming from somebody unknown. Here, he was the director of his viewings. The day before yesterday, while watching the sun’s southern hemisphere, he had discovered an oblong dark spot that fluctuated in shape and size. It was a filament that had been formed because magnetic field lines had been separated from the solar surface for some reason. The process would tear dense plasma, the material constituting the sun, out of the surface. Alain was anxious to get a view from a different perspective as the sun turned and the ship moved on. Maybe the spot would become a protuberance when viewed from the side—a huge arc that would jump out into space, possibly even further than the diameter of the giant planet Jupiter.
Alain sat down and shut his eyes. He still could visualize the filament. Everything was huge on the sun. There was no room for small things like there was on his home planet. They would feel like dwarves once they parked in front of the sun. And somebody was supposed to have built something in that unlikely place? What a huge effort that must have been! And what level of technology had to have been available to them! Suddenly Alain got the feeling that their expedition was bound to fail. What could ants learn if they were to enter a modern robotic factory? Humans were no more than ants compared to the constructors of this alien object.
He went to his chair and sat down. His comparison was somewhat off. Humans had intelligence in a way that ants did not. No matter how advanced the alien technology was, it had to adhere to the laws of physics. It could not perform wonders. Physics was something mankind understood to a good degree even if quantum and relativity theories still had not been unified. But they were far from being concerned with that. While the sun was looking like a huge monster, it still was a normal star—cosmic middle class, so to speak.
“Alain, may I ask you to give up half an hour of telescope time?” Amy asked him.
He was taken aback. “Did I do anything wrong?”
“Not at all. We are just getting into the corona. It is getting hot outside, so I need to initiate the active shielding.”
“What is that?”
“It is technology we used before, on the Enceladus mission. Using the electrical energy produced by the DFD, we will create a magnetic field that mitigates the solar winds,” explained Amy.
“So the sun won’t roast us?”
“On the long flight to Saturn it was mostly about radiation damage, but yes, now it is more about heat. If we can deflect a percentage of the hot particles surrounding us, then we require less cooling.”
“Understood. Will you let me know when I can get back on the telescope?”
“Sure. I just want to determine the effectiveness of the shield without any interference by the telescope. It won’t take long.”
“Thanks, Amy.”
Alain leaned back and closed his eyes. A huge protuberance danced before a black background. It showed him a middle finger.
May 28, 2074, the Yacht
Two days until arrival. Artem had to admit he was afraid. He did not know when he would die, nor how, but he had a very good idea where. The day after tomorrow he would reach the last destination in his life. He had always considered himself a person who did not value his life highly. Life had found a way to show him this was a lie, or his own imagination. It had been a practical way of life, since it had allowed him to make decisions that put him into real danger. It never had been bravery, he had always known that. It was more like an aversion to chocolate making it easier not to eat any. Being successful at denying the importance of one’s own life made it easier to—in the theoretical realm—part with it. Until things got serious. Like right now.
But that was not fair, Artem defended himself. He had not lied or deceived. It was something else that made him mad—the feeling of being at the mercy of the decisions coming out of RB headquarters, of being a ball in the game played by two people he did not even know. The RB Group who reduced him to a henchman was on one side. And the unknown alien who was currently trying to contact him with incomprehensible radio signals was on the other side.
They had been trying to decode the signals since yesterday. The onboard AI had support from specialists in Siberia. It did inform Artem about progress—nothing helpful yet—and which ideas were being looked into. The massive use of bandwidth was striking. It went all the way from radio to x-ray wavelengths, similar to a choir singing a piece written for the full range of voices. The scientists could not agree on what this signified. Was there so much data that a single band did not suffice? Or was it about ensuring the message was noticed, regardless of which band was being monitored?
“Artem?”
“I am here.”
“I have new results from Earth.”
“Have you cracked the code yet?”
“Not even close.”
“What is your status?”
“The most important question still is: What do we take to be the content of the message?”
“Well, the message of course. What is the issue?”
“Imagine a canon, Artem.” The AI seemed to like the analogy. “You might have one voice singing the text and the others are decoration. Or multiple voices sing different texts.”
“At the same time?”
“Yes, why not? That would allow for more transmission in the same time frame.”
“Do you perceive multiple voices, Computer?”
“That is the debate. There is no match between different frequencies. So it can’t be a harmonic canon, it is more a cacophony where everything is jumbled.”
“If it even is multiple voices.”
“Correct, Artem, that is what we don’t know.”
“What’s the news, then?”
“An intern has found an interesting detail: If you add the i
ntensity—you might say the loudness—across all frequencies, and split the continuum into little parts, and then assign numbers to the parts, the result is a non-periodic fraction, a number like Pi.”
“The aliens have hidden Pi in the message?” asked Artem.
“Unfortunately it is not Pi itself—that would have been a step forward.”
It would have been a good idea to transmit a universal constant to establish communication. “Didn’t we do something like that ourselves?” he asked.
“Yes, about hundred years ago the Pioneer probes carried a schematic for the hydrogen molecule to clarify the scale of what was depicted on the drawings intended for aliens.”
“What would you say, Computer? Are they maybe sending us a constant that us primitives simply don’t know about yet?”
“I don’t know. To try something like that would be typical for human thinking. Remember the Enceladus life form. It didn’t bother with math at all, but sent images of its thought processes instead.”
“So all we have is a non-periodic number?”
“That is correct, Artem.”
He simply could not fall asleep right now. Artem tossed back and forth on his reclined seat. Sobachka was snoring but that had never bothered him. There certainly were enough issues to keep him awake. He was racing toward an alien structure that was sending him unintelligible messages. All they had was Pi. Well, something like Pi, a number with an infinite number of decimals that had no repeating pattern.
Pi had fascinated him as a child. He had almost studied mathematics because of this number. Why would the relationship between circumference and diameter of a circle yield such a complicated number?
The fact that there was no systematic repetition, all the way to infinity, had lots of exciting implications. Any tome of global literature, including the Bible and the Quran, could be found coded somewhere in Pi. Dates of birth and death of all mankind were part of Pi, as well as the coordinates of all atoms in the universe or the winning lottery numbers for the next hundred years. One would just need to know where and how to look. Pi was like a synonym for universal knowledge. One would know so much useless information that one would end up knowing nothing. Artem shook his head.
Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction Page 15
