The Battle of Titan

by Sudipto Majumdar

Fluentez did not need another cue, she seemed to be in a similar mood and followed her friend immediately. It was significant that Jorge had not been invited by Mischa or Ramesh by Fluentez to join them. It was clear they were not welcome at this moment.

  Jorge raised his hand and asked Ramesh, “What did I say?” Ramesh just shrugged indicating that he did not understand either.

  The two men gave up trying to figure it out, and just lay down on their towels relaxing. After some time Ramesh asked. “Jorge you don’t seem in your usual high spirits today, what’s up buddy? Something’s eating you up?”

  “Yeah man… I just can’t get over the Sedna – 1 disaster man, I had so many hopes pinned on it. I was just waiting for it to cross the alien ship, and then we would have had a clear view of the direction of their home planet. The bastard aliens blew it up before it could cross the alien ship.” Jorge grumbled.

  “Yeah, I guess that is a drag. But tell me something. It’s something I meant to ask you for some time, but we all have been so busy, I never got round to it. Why were you astronomers all waiting to make the observation after Sedna – 1 had passed the alien ship. Could such a small ship relative to the vastness of space, be occluding their home system?

  It seems highly unlikely that the small profile of the ship, would be in exactly the same spot as the home system to block its light, and how would you guys even be sure of it, if you didn’t know where their home system was?” Ramesh asked to satisfy his curiosity.

  Jorge replied. “That’s not the reason we were waiting. You are right. The probability of the ship being in exactly the same spot as the home system is extremely low. You know the ship’s propulsion system was expelling charged ion plasma at nearly half the speed of light towards us, as it was decelerating while coming in.” Ramesh nodded indicting he was aware of the fact.

  Jorge continued. “Now the most efficient way to discharge this plasma, would be if you could push them out in an exact straight line, with nothing scattering sideways. The aliens’ engineering is good, they can do it far more efficiently than humans can achieve today. But the aliens’ engineering is not perfect. If it had been perfect, we would not have problems.”

  That puzzled Ramesh. “You mean to say that we had problems because the aliens had less than perfect technology! I would assume that would be a good thing for us!”

  Jorge smiled and said. “Not in this case. You see, a very small part of the ions ejecting out of the nozzle were not on an exact straight path, they scattered sideways. Not by much, but they did. This formed a cone in front of the alien ship. Since the ship was so far away from earth, and the ions were coming out at nearly half the speed of light, this cone covered a large circular area centered on the ship. It was large enough to block a significant portion of the visible sector around the ship.

  As you know ions plasma consists of very hot charged particles, which gives off bright light and also interacts vigorously with any space dust it encounters. Space as you know is not really empty, it is full of minute dust particles. It is so sparse that it appears empty to us, but it is there. These ions would interact with the dust and further give out energetic radiation. All this blocks out our ability to view through it. That is why we had to wait till it crossed.”

  “Ahh… now I get it.” Ramesh put his head back into his towel and started gazing up at the sky. “That’s it then. It’s too bad man.”

  After a few moments Ramesh was talking again, but this time almost to himself. “I mean… I wish if we had caught it when it had not started its deceleration towards the sun. It would not have its nozzle flaring towards us and we could have seen past it. But… hey! Wait a minute… Didn’t it! I mean didn’t it surprise us by… you know that maneuver!” Ramesh had his head up again looking at Jorge with a raised voice of excitement.

  Jorge was already sitting up with a shocked look on his face. My god, this was the second time this non assuming genius friend of his had accidentally stumbled on to something, that should have been obvious to any astronomer!

  The alien ship had surprised… no shocked the humans, when suddenly it stopped decelerating turned around and started accelerating towards them. It was such a shock, that it had paralyzed mission control into indecision for a few days. Shortly thereafter the alien ship had launched its opening attack and destroyed Sedna – 1 at high speed.

  It had been a real shock, and humans had scrambled to formulate an appropriate response. Jorge guessed the shock extended to the astronomy community as well, and no one had paused to consider at that moment that the window of opportunity had been opened by the alien ship. First they had stopped their ion plasma engine, then they had turned the ship 180°, then they had restarted the engine.

  He did not recollect the exact time right now, but he knew it had taken well over an hour to do all that. Then they had started the engine again, but this time the nozzle was pointed away. It did cause some disturbance, since it was still a cone, but now the energetic plasma was pointed away from them, causing far less disturbance. They might be able to see through that!

  “Damn Ramesh, how could we all have missed this?! As far as I know, no one has bothered to look for the home planet in the last few days of the Sedna – 1’s images.”

  There were a million things going through Jorge’s mind right now. He wanted to immediately run to his office. There was the issue with Mischa though. Damn he had to fall in love at such an inconvenient time. She had just gone off to the water in a huff, and if he ran off without somehow reconciling with her right now, he would be sleeping alone for a long time.

  He looked towards his friend Ramesh with pleading eyes, pointing his head towards the ladies in the water. Ramesh understood without him having to say anything. He started to walk towards the ladies with a resigned sigh.

  Jorge saw Ramesh talk to Mischa for a long time, with Fluentez listening in. After what seemed like ages he saw all three of them walk back towards their shade. As she approached, Jorge was steeling himself for a box in the ear or a tongue lashing. He was taken aback, when she came and sat on his lap, holding him tightly around the neck and giving him a passionate kiss.

  She then burst out in laughter at Jorge’s puzzlement, with the Fluentez and Ramesh joining in. It seemed all of them knew a joke that he didn’t. “You are such a dumbo Jorge!” Mischa said laughing.

  “I don’t understand, what’s this all about? You were mad at me for some reason I couldn’t figure out, and now that I want to go to work, you are all lovey dovey. You know that I love you, but I sure can’t figure you out.” Jorge said in resignation.

  Mischa laughed “You are not supposed to figure me out sweetie, you just supposed to love me. Now go. I know you want to run all the way back.”

  “Thanks… I will make it up to you I promise.” Jorge got up sounding apologetic.

  “You don’t have to make it up to me Jorge Sterner, you’ve already made my day.” She beamed, which puzzled Jorge, since he couldn’t see what he had done to make her so happy. In the meanwhile Ramesh was giving a pleading look to Fluentez.

  “All right… all right… go… go… go. I don’t want you to be moping around here like a sad puppy. You want to go with him, so go and have fun. When we get back, we will get you boys something to eat.” Fluentez said with a smile and an animated gesture to Ramesh.

  The said their byes and gave their mandatory kisses before running up the beach. Their impatience was showing now. While they were in the car, Jorge asked Ramesh. “What did you tell her, to put her in such a good mood?”

  “The truth my friend… just the truth.” Ramesh said with a mysterious smile.

  “So you just told her that we had a brainwave, and want to dump them on the beach and get to our office, and she melted and fell into my lap?” Jorge asked incredulously, making it clear that he didn’t believe Ramesh.

  “You are too literal minded my friend, I told her a higher truth.” Ramesh was now smiling and talking like a sage, which irritated Jorge even more.
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  “So pray enlighten us mere mortals oh fountain of wisdom, what that higher truth is?” Jorge said as sarcastically as he could.

  “Simply that Jorge Sterner the jerk had fallen head over heels so much in love with a particular lady, that despite him needing to go to his office so urgently, where previously he would have abandoned his own mother, he is grinding his heels in the sand in agony, waiting for his lady love to return from the water, so that he can ask for her forgiveness. He will wait the entire day but not ask to leave his lady love in a lurch on the beach. That he will suffer his agony silently, for the agony of hurting his lady is a lot worse for him.” Ramesh finished with a flourish of his hands.

  “You said all that!?” Jorge sounded incredulous.

  “And a bit more.” Ramesh said, this time sounding serious.

  “Remind me to sock you in the eye, when we get off the car.” Jorge said not so jokingly.

  “Be honest to yourself Jorge, you are 100% in love with Mischa, and so is she. You two are bonded for good.” Ramesh jibed back at him.

  “Yeah? Just like you and Fluentez I guess.” Jorge sparred back at Ramesh.

  “Yes. The only difference is that I don’t feel the need to act aloof, as if it’s cool not to care about any girl too much. It’s OK and it’s cool to be madly in love with someone Jorge, your reputation will not take a beating, I assure you.” Ramesh retorted.

  And so on it went back and forth all the way to Jorge’s office. Jorge had been made part of Herman’s investigative team, and hence had access to all of Sedna – 1’s data on the servers. While Jorge started collating and marking all the data from the relevant time period, Ramesh started a search on the investigative team’s research database to see if anyone had already done or started a research in the direction they intended to embark. No one had.

  Jorge meanwhile had marked all the relevant data on the server, but realized he had not given any thought as to how or where to begin. He stared blankly at the screen for some time before charting out a plan of action. Suddenly he was thankful that Ramesh was with him, for his plan required a lot of computation and programming. It seems that no one could do any science these days without the help of computer geeks.

  “OK Ramesh, here is what we need to do, and I am going to need lots of help from you. It’s going to be a long day and perhaps a long night. Hopefully the girls would get us a lot of food.

  I just had a look at a single frame of the data, and obviously there is nothing new that can be seen in it. This is expected, otherwise we would have found the home planet by now. What we need to do is compositing. This means that we take frame after frame and superimpose one over the other.” Jorge said after he had charted out the search plan in his mind.

  Ramesh said a bit irritably. “I know what compositing means, it is a standard technique in image processing, but why do you need to do that?”

  Jorge replied. “You see there is a lot of white noise in each frame. This means that in each frame there are a lot of dots of miniscule light, which are really not stars. They could be imperfections of the lenses of the telescope playing with light, or a random dust particle coming in the way, shining a light. If I were to simply increase the contrast of a frame, then these random dots will also increase in brightness and start looking like stars.

  What we need the computer to do, is to take one frame and compare it with the previous. All the stars will still be in both the frames, but random noise would change from frame to frame. If we can get the algorithm right, we should be able to eliminate all these ghost dots from the frames, while accumulating the light of the real stars, thus making them brighter in a darker sky. That way I hope a faint star which is not visible right now, would become visible.”

  They got round to working for four straight hours, before the women arrived with the promised food. It seemed that they knew their men very well, because there was enough food for lunch, supper and dinner, and not just pizzas at that, but real food, nutritious and healthy.

  They ate and coddled a bit. Then both Jorge and Ramesh got back to work, and the women started getting bored. They left after extracting a promise that they will the first people to know if the boys found anything.

  There were a few times when Jorge decided to call Heidi for help in understanding some mathematics or some concept, but they eventually figured these out and did not need to call her. It was well past midnight when they had finished making the algorithm, then programming and finally testing them.

  They sat back and decided to finish the last of the food, the women had brought for them. Jorge also went down to the coffee station and filled himself a carafe full of coffee. Then the conversation turned to the more somber subject of the recent encounter with the aliens and what each of them thought about the intention of the aliens.

  Jorge was ambiguous, saying it was possible that the aliens may not even understand the concept of friend and enemy, may be they just acted on responses, it was hard to tell their intention from just this encounter, and the entire incident could be just an accident or misunderstanding.

  Ramesh was sanguine that the aliens were hostile. He was firmly in the camp of the Darwinians, who believed that they had evolved with the same creed of survival of the fittest, and would look at any life other than their own as a threat.

  “Maybe you are right my friend, but I would like to believe in the brighter alternative.” Jorge said, raising his coffee mug in a toast. They sat there in silence, lost in their own thoughts about what the future held for them and humanity. Jorge was not sure how much time had passed, but was suddenly shaken out of his reverie by the sound of a soft ping on the terminal Ramesh had been working on.

  “It is done!” Ramesh exclaimed waking up from a light nap that he had fallen into. “Let’s see what we had got!” Both of them peered into the screen at the enhanced image being displayed there, and they found… nothing!

  This was not just disappointing, but devastating as far as Jorge was concerned. He quickly scanned the technical parameters and confirmed that the enhanced image would show even the faintest brown dwarf, emitting no light at a temperature of as low as -90° C up to a distance of 5 light years. And if there had been a star the brightness of sun, it would have been visible even over a few hundred light years away. There was nothing however on the center of the screen.

  Ramesh looked hopefully at Jorge, wishing him to interpret the image and data in some way that would magically make the home star appear. Jorge could just shake his head negatively in disappointment. Ramesh seem to take the disappointment almost to the point of despair. He had worked hard and pinned a lot of hope on this.

  “This can’t be right, we must be missing something Jorge. Let’s check our algorithms and the methods we used, we must have gotten something wrong, this just can’t be right.” He almost seem to be breaking down.

  It was heartbreaking for Jorge to hear his friend so disappointed. He was himself devastated. They both had worked so hard on this. Ramesh just kept on repeating. “We must have missed something. We must have missed something.”

  Ramesh’s words kept on repeating so many times, that subconsciously even he started wondering if they had missed something, when an epiphany of sorts struck Jorge. He stood up and faced Ramesh.

  “Listen, we pointed Sedna – 1 at the exact alignment to its trajectory to look at its point of origin right? What if this enhanced image is right, and we are looking at the alien ships point of origin?” Jorge said excitedly.

  “But that does not make any sense Jorge, there is nothing on that image, unless it came out of thin air, or empty space in this case. I think you need some sleep. Both of us do actually.” Ramesh said completely dejected.

  Jorge was even more animated now, as a train of thought had started running in his mind. “No. No. NO. Just listen. What if the direction of the point of origin of the ship is correct, but we are seeing nothing. Not because there was nothing there. The star was in fact in that exact position when the ship
started, but in the time it has taken the ship to travel to earth, the star has moved in position, hence we see nothing there right now!”

  “I am no Astronomer, but if my basic knowledge on Astronomy is correct, then don’t stars take thousands of years to change even a small position as visible from earth?” Ramesh sounded dubious.

  “Yes they do, but what if the ship has been traveling for thousands of years? Even if it has not been traveling for thousands of years, what if its origin star is a nearby star but at a high velocity of motion relative to our sun?” Jorge would not be deflated now.

  “I don’t know, that looks quite improbable with a lot of ifs and buts. It sounds desperate frankly.” Ramesh was really in a despondent mood.

  “‘If you’ve eliminated all other possibilities whatever remains must be the truth’, didn’t some famous guy say that?” Jorge quipped.

  “Sherlock Holmes, he was a fictional character Jorge, written by Arthur Conan Doyle a 19th century British author. And the correct quote is ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’” Ramesh quipped back.

  “Whatever. I didn’t realize you were a literature buff. But I meant exactly what I said. Let us eliminate the possibilities. We agree that it is extremely unlikely that the ship stopped somewhere and changed its course to come here, so we have sort of eliminated that possibility. We agree that the ship could not come out of thin air, or empty space in this case. We agree that we are looking at the direction of the point of origin, but find no star there, so what else is left but to assume that the star must have moved position?”

  Ramesh had to grudgingly agree that when put that way, he could not find a fault with the logic. So he took another tack. “So let’s assume for a moment that your hypothesis is correct, how do we go about finding the changed position of this star, where do we look?”

  “That is simple. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has charted the motion of all stars within about 1000 light years from the sun fairly accurately. All we have to do is see if any of those stars would have intersected the path of the alien ship in the last 100,000 years or so.