“I did,” said Anofi, to his surprise.
Eventually Smythe-White dismissed the King’s Witness and turned his attention to the group in the dock. “I’ll not have dialogue with a rabble. Who’ll speak for you?”
“I will,” said Aikens. “Do you contest the facts that have been presented here?”
“I contest the context in which you’ve seen them,” Aikens began, “and that one crucial fact has been excluded. Why did we do this—”
“We are not discussing motive, we are discussing objective facts. Did you meet on the days so described?”
Aikens sighed. “We did.”
“And did you without proper authority utilize the facilities of both the University of Cambridge and the Royal Air Force station at Duxford?”
“Yes, but—”
“Did you represent yourselves as ambassadors to members of His Majesty’s government?”
“Only because no one would listen—”
“And were you present in the Wilshire Pub as alleged by the King’s Witness?”
Aikens gave no answer.
“Did you hear the question?”
“Yes.”
“Then answer it.”
“No.”
“Let me warn you again, your intransigence—”
“Fuck that,” Anofi said suddenly. “Don’t you understand—he’s just refusing to be a party to a lynching. You had this decided before we came in here. But because we’re English, we have to keep up appearances. Yes, we were in the pub, your King’s Squeak remembered it all quite well. We were setting our sights on the King because all of his tin-headed servants are too stupid to recognize the importance of what we know. I only hope you three live long enough to die of a heart attack when the first spaceship pops out of the sky.”
“Attagirl, Jeri! You tell ’em,” Eddington whooped.
“You abuse the goodwill of this court,” said Smythe-White crossly. He gestured to the clerk. “Delete all but her direct answer, ah, ‘Yes, we were at the pub, your King’s Witness remembered it all quite well.’ ”
He turned to the other members of the panel. “Have you any other questions for the defendants?” They did not. “Then I ask you for your verdict.”
Each scrawled something on a slip of paper and slid it along the bench to Smythe-White. The First Magistrate unfolded each in turn and read its message.
“You were right, but it won’t change anything,” Schmidt said quietly to Anofi.
“I know,” she said.
Smythe-White raised his head. “Marc Aikens—Jeri Anofi—Laurence Eddington—Josef Schmidt. You have agreed to the facts, and your explanation has been found fraudulent on its face. This court finds you guilty of criminal conspiracy, fraud, and treason against the Crown. You are hereby sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead. Before sentence is carried out, the customary reviews of this case will be requested on your behalf.”
Following the trial, a profound depression settled over Aikens, and he passed the long hours alone in the cell block in a lethargic haze in which nothing seemed to matter. He could not rouse himself to care enough to count the passing days or even to see that he ate enough to sustain his body. Larger concerns such as the coming visitors or his own impending death were too unreal to contemplate.
No prison psychiatrist came to plumb his psyche, nor did a chaplain visit to offer solace; he was spared those cinematic clichés. The only interruption was the click of footsteps and perhaps a word of badinage from the guard, three times daily when his meals were brought and once more when it was time for his obligatory walk in the open courtyard.
They made no other demands on him, nor he on them. After a time—he could not say how long—he began to hope for the final interruption and lay awake on his bunk listening to the empty spaces of his world, listening for a note of finality and a respite from his ennui.
At last there came the novelty that Aikens had come to expect would signal his execution day. Rather than one set of footsteps, there were several, mingled arrhythmically, and voices. Two men and a woman passed through the open checkpoint at the end of the corridor and stopped in front of his cell. One of the men carried a bundle under his arm. Supine on his bunk, Aikens eyed them curiously.
“That’s Aikens?” asked the woman.
“That’s him.”
“Great God, we can’t take him like that. Get him up and get him cleaned. That will never do.”
Aikens was taken to a shower room he had never seen before, where he dutifully washed himself to the specifications of his escort. Returned to the cell, he changed into the new clothing they had brought, oblivious to his own nudity before the woman. The clothes hung loosely on his diminished frame; the woman clucked unhappily.
“It will have to do,” she said finally. “Bring him along.” Automatically, he offered his wrists behind him for handcuffs. “No need for that. You’re not going anywhere, now, are you?” asked one of the men.
Aikens’ spirits brightened at that, and he fell in between the two men with some bounce restored to his step. He knew where the executions were carried out; a helpful guard had volunteered the information. So it came as a surprise when the woman led them away from that part of the complex and, instead, toward the prisoner receiving area.
There he was bundled into the back seat of a black police sedan, the woman joining him there, the man who had carried the clothing taking the left seat beside the driver.
“Westminster,” the woman told the driver.
“I thought—” Aikens said, his voice breaking.
“So you can talk, after all. You thought what?”
“I thought this meant—” After so much time spent thinking it, he was surprised to find he could not bring himself to say it.
“Your execution?”
He nodded.
“No. Not today.” Then, seeing his puzzlement, she added, “That’s scheduled for next week. But today you get an audience with the King.”
King William V of the House of Windsor had been dubbed by the public “the boy-king of Westminster” only partly because of his youthful features arid slender build. The French-made, IRA-wielded rocket which had killed King Charles and made a paraplegic of Diana, the Queen Mother, had in the same stroke made William V the youngest monarch to ascend to the throne in five hundred years.
The “boy-king” sobriquet was affectionately used for the most part. An almost tangible public shock resulting from the tragedy which had befallen William’s parents had brought to the surface the fierce pride which the modern Englishman harbored for the monarchy. (A pride little, if any, reduced by the savage retribution for the assassination carried out by British forces in Northern Ireland.)
But Aikens was an educated man. Just as he had little patience for preachers, he saw little relevance in the comings and goings of an anachronistic medieval figurehead. Consequently, he knew deuced little about the man in whose gardens he waited for an audience he had never expected to be granted.
Presently the King appeared on one of the garden pathways without fanfare or entourage. In a voice that was childish in timbre but commanding in tone, he sent the police guard away, then sat down on a stone bench opposite Aikens. Aikens, painfully aware of his ignorance of proper manners, found the informality discomfiting.
“Professor Aikens, do I understand all this correctly? Do you and your colleagues claim to have received and translated a message from space?” asked William.
“Yes—from the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia.”
“There. What am I to do with you? You insist on making claims that are patently nonsense—except for the fact that it’s you who makes the claim.”
“It wasn’t easy to convince myself. I spent many hours looking for less outrageous explanations.”
“And because you failed to find one, you are scheduled to die next Tuesday in Old Bailey.”
“They really will do that—for such a trivial offense?”
“Haven’t
you wondered why the prisons are so empty? In times such as these, there’s little support for feeding, clothing, and boarding the Crown’s enemies.”
“And you are comfortable with that?”
“Of course not. But neither is it something that I can change. What powers of review once resided with the House of Lords have fallen to me, and modest powers they are. I dare not give orders that might be refused. I do not believe that you and your party meant any threat to me. That was the product of a certain understandable oversensitivity. Nor do I believe your claim to have contacted aliens. As you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
“We were prepared to offer it, and still are.”
“Then do—now, to me. You have one hour to convince me. If you do, then there are some things I may be able to do for you. If not—”
“How can I—if your mind is no more open than Smythe-White and the others.” William smiled. “But you’re in luck, because as it happens, I should like it very much if you were right. Please, begin.”
One hour stretched into three, and then into dinner, served to them on silver trolleys by mute house servants. The session reminded Aikens of nothing so much as oral exams—except that for the first time in many years, it was Aikens who bore the burden of answering the jury’s interrogatives.
The King questioned Aikens closely and knowledgeably. What steps had been taken to rule out the various sorts of interference which cropped up during such measures? Mightn’t the signal be some natural phenomenon creatively interpreted, much as when the first pulsar was tabbed “LGM” for “little green men”? What about Cepheid variables or natural masers or flare stars? How did he explain the fact that conscious searches conducted through the 1990’s in the Netherlands, U.S.S.R., and U.S.A. turned up no evidence of life elsewhere?
Backtracking into space physics, electromagnetic theory, and biology, Aikens argued his case. The discovery of the Vegan halo in 1983 and the Beta Pictoris disk a year later proved at last that other solar systems existed, nay, were commonplace. Work in American laboratories had recreated elementary chemical evolution, through to the creation of the first simple self-replicating organismoids.
With the general argument established to King William’s satisfaction, the questioning turned to the specific case. Here the monarch was less easily persuaded.
“The original discoverer disappears. You did not collect the data yourself. The man who did does so in secret, so he says, and there are, of course, no witnesses. The signal is reportedly strong, yet you cannot tell me which of a dozen stars in that part of the sky is responsible. The message proves to be encrypted in English, which you can explain only by assuming they have received our own inadvertent signals.”
“They say they did,” Aikens pointed out.
“The translators say they say they did,” King William corrected. “Dr. Aikens, there is no good reason why a first contact should have to conform to the way we think it ought to happen. But—”
“Would you believe it if you heard it yourself, from your own equipment with your own technicians supervising? Would that satisfy you that the message was only received here, not created here? Or would you think we had found some way of extending our fraud into deep space?”
“How can that be done?”
“Take us to any satellite earth station with low-noise receiving equipment for the 1 to 10 gigahertz range. There were dozens of them, not just observatories. Surely one must be intact.”
“There is an INTELSAT ground station at Burton-upon-Trent, but whether it can do what you ask I can’t say. Write down your needs and I will find out.”
“I want all of us there—the whole team. Bring as many guards as you like, but the whole team has a right to be there.”
“I’m glad you are feeling better enough to be presumptuous,” King William said. “I’ll see what can be arranged. But you must realize that I can make no promises even if this test is conducted, that if you fail—”
“Then we’ll be executed,” Aikens said soberly. “And fifty or a hundred or five hundred years from now, when the Cassiopeians make good on their promises, everybody will know that we were right. But that will be too late, for us and for you, because all the options will be gone.”
“You are feeling better,” King William said approvingly. “Now, is there anything else?”
Aikens thought for a moment.
“Yes,” he said finally. “What’s today’s date?”
At ten A.M. on the Tuesday following, the Royal Coach trundled off down the tracks toward Southampton, bearing the King, his personal servants, and a monarch’s idea of luggage for a vacation. That was all subterfuge and window dressing, made complete by the presence of one of William V’s doubles.
The real King was aboard one of two identical RAF turbo-copters which had touched down on the palace helipad before dawn. The first had ferried diplomatic mail to Heathrow; the second carried the Home Secretary to an industrial conference in Birmingham. Both headed for Burton-upon-Trent when then-face missions were complete. His mail had had the King and his technical advisor for company; the Home Secretary, a narrowband multi-channel receiver pulled from the warehouse once known as the Royal College of Science.
A third turbocopter, this with Medivac markings, had filed a flight plan to Oxford, taken on six passengers, and lifted off from Heathrow. It too, was bound for Burton-upon-Trent, carrying Aikens, Schmidt, and Anofi. Eddington, Aikens had been told apologetically, was in Maudsley Hospital in Croyden and unable to travel. There was no further word on why he was there, and Aikens wondered to himself if Eddington was some sort of hostage to guarantee their behavior.
Not that there was any chance of them escaping. Except perhaps for Anofi, it was not in their nature, and besides, the three Royal Marines escorting them were alert and well-armed.
While Anofi and Schmidt chatted happily, obviously of the mind that their troubles were over and the detection of the signal a mere formality, Aikens occupied himself with calculating the coordinates which would be used for the intercept. His own good spirits were chastened by the recognition that there were many ways the trip could end badly for them, and but one chance it could end well. If the coordinates were good, if the equipment was adequate, if die transmission had continued, if… Worry made the short trip longer.
They were the last to land on the close-cropped pasture adjoining the INTELSAT station. The gleaming white dish, some twenty metres across, was inclined southward at the low angle Aikens expected of an antenna trained on a geosynchronous satellite. On disembarking, Schmidt became dismayed at the sight of it.
“It’s a fixed dish,” he said in disbelief.
“No, it’s movable. Hand gearing, though,” Aikens said, pointing to the mounting. “We’re certainly not going to be doing any tracking.”
“That’s all right—the intensity curve will let us get a measurement of the width in space of the beacon and calculate backward to estimate the distance to the source,” Anofi said.
“Optimist,” Schmidt muttered. King William came to join them as they walked up the slight rise to the station gate.
“I have some news of your friend,” he said as he reached them. “Apparently he has quite lost his grip, became depressed, tried to kill himself. They’re keeping an eye on him at Maudsley. If you succeed here, the staff may want to talk to you on our return.”
“If we’re not, will they just give him a razor?” asked Anofi sotto voce.
“Thank you for informing us,” Aikens said.
“I’m very sorry not to have better news. Were there any signs?”
Aikens thought quickly of Eddington’s volatility, his treatment of Agatha, his possessiveness about the message, and his obsession about its contents. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there were. He was living on the edge. The trial must have pushed him over.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” he said, and paused. “Jenkins tells me that the unit we brought with us is rack-compatible with the I
NTELSAT equipment. I’m not certain I understand, but he assures me that means the electronics will be ready by the time the dish is reoriented.”
Aikens looked at his watch. “I’ll set it up to allow ninety minutes. We can always chase it if we run late—it’ll be in the sky for several hours yet.”
While Schmidt peered over the shoulders of the technicians installing the receiver, Anofi saw to the recording equipment, and Aikens supervised the repositioning of the dish. The last was accomplished not by hand, as Aikens had predicted, but with an electric hand drill placed in fittings on the dish cradle—one for altitude, one for azimuth.
An hour and a quarter later, they were all gathered in the station’s crowded control room. “We’re set up to record the data on that minicomp over there, but you’ll see it here on this display,” Anofi said, pointing to a large monitor. Two flat oscilloscopelike traces tracked across the screen, one near the middle and one at the bottom.
“That’s a real-time display of the output from the receiver at the two frequencies the message used—1455 megahertz and 1525 megahertz,” she said. “It’s flat now because the unit is off. When we turn it on we’ll get some small amount of noise and, we hope, the waveforms of the message.” She looked at Aikens, and he nodded. She twisted a knob at the console and looked up at the screen expectantly.
The traces became ragged lines, with many small peaks and valleys. “Well, there’s the noise,” she said, frowning.
“We have about ten minutes before the source passes the telescope’s line of sight,” Aikens said quickly. “We don’t know the angular size of the source. If we pick it up four minutes early, it’s two degrees; two minutes, one degree; one minute, half a degree. If it’s a point source we may only get it on the fly.”
“Should have it by 2:12, then,” said one of the INTELSAT technicians.
They waited, first in silence, then with a buzz of whispered conversations as the trace continued to display nothing but noise. The voices stilled briefly again at 2:07, when an INTELSAT man switched on an overhead speaker and filled the room with an unmodulated hiss.
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