Analog SFF, November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He sank down on his cot and dug into the sack of food they had given him. At least the crunchy brown pellets were edible. If he had to live the rest of his days as a zoological curiosity, he could take comfort in the knowledge that he wouldn't starve to death.

  * * * *

  Melissa and Will waited by their landing craft for two days before they grew tired of doing nothing and ventured out in search of the Martians.

  "They must be waiting for us to come to them,” said Melissa as they trudged over the ridge to the south of the ship.

  Will snorted. “Unless they're cowering in caves somewhere, waiting for the thunder gods to go away and leave them alone."

  "They're intelligent,” Melissa said. “They have to be."

  "They'd better be, or we're screwed."

  They topped the rise and immediately spotted the silver glint of metal against the red landscape. “There!” Melissa said. “What did I tell you? It's some kind of vehicle."

  Will squinted. “Looks like a rocket on its side."

  "No it doesn't."

  She led the way down the hillside. As they drew closer she said, “Okay, so it's a rocket on its side. But it's a rocket! They've got space technology. We'll get our ride back home."

  They came up to the engines first. Will saw an open access panel and peeked inside, then said, “This doesn't look like a liquid-fueled engine. That means we can't scavenge fuel from here."

  "We won't need to,” she said confidently. “Where there's a rocket, there's bound to be support facilities."

  They found the airlock and climbed inside. The cabin was eerily familiar, even on its side. Control chair, tool cabinets, food storage lockers—lots of food storage lockers, mostly empty—and air tanks the size of small cars. When Will ran some of the air tanks’ contents through their chromatograph, it registered nearly pure methane with just a trace of argon. And no carbon dioxide.

  "Why would a Martian need methane?” he asked. “And why this much of it? And this much food, too? This looks like an interplanetary ship, not something for local travel."

  Melissa frowned. “Maybe there was methane in the atmosphere before the planet dried up, and they still breathe it in their underground cities. We've spotted transient methane plumes here before. Maybe those were from leaks or something."

  "Maybe this ship's not from Mars,” said Will.

  * * * *

  Larry wondered what Tnaxis was doing now. He'd spread cat food out on the floor, a big pile of it in the middle of his bunkroom, then he had set six pieces carefully in a row toward the door. The first three were fairly close to the big pile, then the spacing grew farther and farther apart out to the sixth one. Then Tnaxis broke a piece of cat food into pieces and set one of them next to the third whole piece, two more next to the fourth piece, four of them in a line next to the fifth piece, and five pieces in a line next to the sixth one. Some kind of mathematical series?

  Then Tnaxis crunched a piece of food into powder and spread it in a ring around the sixth piece. Was he displaying pi in some alien numeric system?

  Tnaxis looked up at him, then back at his display. “Larry,” he said in his gravelly voice, and he pointed at the third piece from the big pile. Then he said “Tnaxis” and pointed at one of the small pieces next to the farthest one away. The one with the ring around it.

  "Oh, holy mother,” Larry said. “You're from one of Saturn's moons."

  * * * *

  "Titan?” Melissa said when Mission Control radioed them with the breakthrough. They were still inside the alien spaceship, trying to learn whatever they could about it. “Okay, that would explain the methane, but why did it come here instead of Earth?” It was a rhetorical question; Mission Control would be twelve minutes with an answer even if they had one handy.

  "Why did we come here instead of Titan?” Will asked.

  "Because it's closer,” she replied. “And we didn't know anybody lived there."

  "Mars is closer to Titan than Earth is,” Will pointed out.

  "But Earth is obviously alive."

  "Maybe they weren't looking for life. Or maybe oxygen is poisonous to them, so Mars looked more hospitable. The gravity is certainly more like their own."

  "Maybe,” Melissa said. “Or maybe we're missing something obvious."

  They kept poking around in the ship, finding plenty of odd and interesting alien artifacts but nothing that would help them refuel their own ship and get back home. Will had another look in the engine compartment and decided it had to be a fusion drive, which would be very cool for the people back on Earth when somebody figured out how it worked, but not much use for Will and Melissa.

  "I'd give anything to meet these guys,” Melissa said. “We were so close. If we'd gotten here a couple of months earlier, we'd be exploring side-by-side with a genuine Titanian."

  "We'd be wondering how to get him to Earth is what we'd be doing,” Will said. “As it is, he's at least safe. And now that we know there's life on Titan, we'll be sending a mission there as fast as we can build the ship. He's the lucky one; he's got a decent chance of getting home alive."

  "Point taken,” Melissa said. “I'm ... I'm sorry I talked you into this."

  He snorted. “Water under the bridge. We're on Mars with a year's worth of food and we've got a genuine alien spaceship to examine as well. A lot can happen in a year. Maybe we'll figure out how to—"

  There came a loud roar from outside, which, given the thin Martian air, meant something really loud was happening. They rushed outside, expecting to see a landslide or a flash flood or a meteor strike, but stopped dead in their tracks to watch another rocket just like the one beside them descend from the sky and land in a swirl of red dust. They waited breathlessly for someone to emerge, but when nothing more happened they stepped closer, climbed the ladder that led up one of the landing legs, and banged on the hatch.

  Nobody answered, so they opened it and stuck their heads inside. There was an empty chair facing a window and a small control panel on which half a dozen lights blinked. The switches and lights were labeled in a script neither of them recognized.

  "What do you think, is this the Titanian's rescue vehicle?” Will asked.

  Melissa pointed at the single large button in the middle of the control panel, the one that blinked most insistently. “I don't know,” she said, “but I'll bet if we push that, we'll find out."

  Will looked out through the window at the barren Martian landscape. There would be no rescue from out there. Earth had enough resources to fund a mission to Titan or to Mars, but not both. With a live Titanian waiting for a ride home and an entire civilization to explore once they took him home, he knew which way they would choose. He and Melissa had sealed their fate when they'd decided to land.

  Or had they? “Can we fly this thing back to Earth?” he asked.

  They looked at the controls. There were maybe a dozen buttons on the entire panel. “This thing's as automatic as a toaster,” she said. “We have one choice: Go where it takes us and hope the people on the other end can keep us alive until NASA gets their ship out there."

  * * * *

  Mission Control didn't like the idea, but the only alternative they could suggest was for Melissa and Will to wait on Mars until their food and air ran out. The alien rations would probably extend their lives a while, but they looked and tasted like cat food.

  "The way I see it,” Melissa said, “we can either wait to starve or suffocate on Mars, or we can take this thing to Titan and beat the rest of humanity there by at least a year. We'll not only be the first people to land on Mars, but the first ones on Titan as well."

  When she put it that way, Will couldn't think of a single reason to say nay. Besides the risk of dying horribly along the way, or of being vivisected once they got there, of course, but to a person facing certain death in a little over a year anyway, that risk didn't seem so bad.

  So they emptied the alien ship's food lockers and filled them with their own supplies, brought in
a second acceleration couch and their personal gear, and patched in their own air recycling system from their backup habitat module so they could regenerate oxygen on the way. The system wasn't 100 percent efficient, but they were able to transfer enough of their portable oxygen supplies to replenish what they needed.

  They spent a couple of weeks exploring the floodplain at the mouth of the Valles Marineris—it was, after all, what they had originally set out to do—but when they found no sign of life other than the alien spaceships, they climbed inside the functional one, closed the airlock behind them, and pushed the “go” button.

  The ship roared off the planet and headed for deep space. They had no idea how long it would take to get to Titan, nor what they would find when they got there, but that was okay. After all, facing the unknown was what exploration was all about.

  Copyright © 2009 Jerry Oltion

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  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: LESSONS FROM THE LAB by Jeffery D. Kooistra

  The most important thing for a successful business is location, location, location. The most important thing for as successful experiment is calibration, calibration, calibration. That having been said, location can also be critical in an experiment.

  For instance, at our house, we know that if we set the thermostat, which is located in the living room, at 71 degrees, that the room temperature in the family room, where we spend most of our time, will be a comfortable 70 degrees. However, if one day I decide to do my reading in the living room, and start using the lamp next to my favorite chair, then we'd soon find that the house was routinely staying too cold. Why? Because said lamp is within a foot of the thermostat, and the increase in average temperature at the position of the thermostat renders the previous calibration useless.

  When you work in experimental physics, you have it drilled into you that without proper calibration, at the end of the experiment you will have, as my professor one time screamed at me, no data. (I'll get to that story in a minute.)

  When I was working with Dr. Van Zytveld to measure the thermopower of liquid rare earth elements, recalibration of our instruments had to be done all the time. One reason for this was that the thermocouples we used to measure temperatures were essentially consumed after each experimental run. Even if not visibly damaged, after one use where they were called upon to measure temperatures above a thousand degrees C for many hours, they were unlikely to survive a second run, let alone remain accurate. Also, we frequently rebuilt the ovens we used to achieve those high temperatures. After each experimental run, I would have to experiment with my rebuilt rig and make sure it would track along the same curve as the previous runs had. That is, I had to calibrate it with the previous work.

  When doing experimental physics, the test rig used to make measurements is a separate experiment in its own right. If you haven't experimented with your test rig enough to know exactly how it works, you will never be satisfied that the measurements you make with it are valid, or at least you shouldn't be.

  For my junior year laboratory requirement, I measured the speed of light in gases. The methodology for this experiment was quite clever. I had to fill a small cylindrical chamber with various gases, then pass a laser beam through it, the chamber being in one arm of an interferometer. When the split laser beam was recombined, it formed an interference pattern. As the gas was slowly pumped out of the chamber, I could see fringe shifts in the interference pattern, and the number of shifts allowed me to calculate the speed of light in the gas.

  The experiment was an interesting mix of high tech with low. The interferometer has been around since the 1800s, the laser since the 1960s, and to count the fringe shifts I used a very modern (for the 1980s) trace storage oscilloscope attached to a light sensor. To measure the pressure, I used a U-tube mercury manometer, which goes back to the Middle Ages.

  The way you read a manometer is to measure the difference in height of the mercury column between the right and left sides. What I did was to measure the height on one side from the unpressurized position and then double it. I thought I was saving time. Unfortunately, this method would only be valid if the right and left sides were volumetrically uniform, and they were not.

  I was a bit slow in accepting that all my labor might be worthless, at which point Professor Van Baak screamed at me, “You have NO data!” (Fortunately, there was a simple, albeit tedious, way to recover my data and so save my experiment.)

  As embarrassing as it was at the time, now, 25 years later I'm glad I made that mistake and learned that lesson. It greatly sensitized me to the need to examine all the assumptions that go into a measurement, and helped me notice when others were less than punctilious about it.

  Speaking of less-than-punctilious measuring, I'd like to call your attention to a report available at SurfaceStations.org entitled “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” The short answer is NO. And along with the unreliable data goes much of the case for global warming.

  The report is written by Anthony Watts, who has been doing broadcast meteorology for 25 years, both on TV and radio. He is currently chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM radio and also runs the website wattsupwiththat.com. The site provides a welcome dissenting side in the global warming debate and I encourage you to check it out. Watts founded SurfaceStations.org in 2007, “a Web site devoted to photographing and documenting the quality of weather stations across the U.S."

  Why do this? The answer to that is stated in the executive summary:

  The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can't know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can't trust the data.

  The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations. (Pg. 1)

  The story of what prompted Watts to begin this study is interesting in its own right. As Watt says, “It began when I set out to study the effect of paint changes on the thermometer shelters, known as Stevenson Screens, used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Service (NOAA/NWS) to track changes in the climate of the U.S.” (Pg. 4)

  From 1890 until 1979, Stevenson Screens, which are just wood-slatted boxes, were specified to be coated with whitewash. In 1979, this was changed to semigloss latex paint. In 2007, with some time on his hands, Watts decided to find out if this change in coating affected the temperature readings inside the Stevenson Screens.

  He went about it this way (although I can't show the picture of Figure 2, it looks as described):

  I purchased three new Stevenson Screen thermometer shelters, shown in Figure 2. One is bare wood, unpainted, as a control; the middle one is painted with latex, as sent by the supplier; and the third is painted with a historically accurate (for early twentieth century) whitewash mixture that I obtained (both materials and formula) from the head chemist at the National Lime Company. Whitewash was mixed after conferring with chemist Richard Godbey of the Chemical Lime Company in Henderson, Nevada, and after reading a paper he authored on the history and home creation of whitewash. (Pg. 4)

  I must point out that this account represents a level of attention to detail, particularly with respect to the whitewash formula, that should be emulated in any kind of experimental replication, but seldom is.

  This is what Watts found:

  This test showed that changes to the surface coatings did make a difference in the temperatures recorded in these standard thermometer shelters, shown in Figure 3. I found a 0.3 degrees F difference in maximum temperature and a 0.8 degrees F difference in minimum temperature between the whitewash and latex-painted screens. This is a big difference, especially when we consider that the concern over anthropogenic global warming was triggered by what these statio
ns reported was an increase of about 1.2 degrees F over the entire twentieth century. (Pg. 5)

  * * * *

  Having discovered that the switch did significantly affect temperature readings, Watts “set out to determine if the Stevenson Screens of the U.S. network of temperature-monitoring stations had been updated to latex paint as required by NWS specification changes in 1979.” There were three stations relatively close to his home base of Chico, California. Here is what he found. “The first station, at the Chico University Experiment Farm, had been converted to latex, but it also contained a surprise. It had two screens, one of which was converted to automated radio reporting. I was surprised to find NWS had installed the radio electronics just inches from the temperature sensor, inside the screen."(Pg. 5)

  The second station, in Orland, California, was well maintained and properly painted with latex. Unfortunately, this is what he found at the third site: “The third station, however, in Marysville, California, revealed the Chico University station was not a fluke. As I stood next to the temperature sensor, I could feel warm exhaust air from the nearby cell phone tower equipment sheds blowing past me! I realized this official thermometer was recording the temperature of a hot zone near a large parking lot and other biasing influences including buildings, air conditioner vents, and masonry.” (Pg. 5)

  The rest is history. Two of the three stations Watts visited were not measuring what they were supposed to be measuring. As he puts it for the Marysville station, “Yet here we had an official climate-monitoring station, dubbed part of the ‘high-quality’ USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) network that provides data for use in scientific studies, actually measuring the temperature of a parking lot with air conditioners blowing exhaust air on it, and missing more than half of its data for the month of July!” (Pg. 6) So it was obvious there was a need to survey the rest of the stations in the USHCN, and the Surface Stations project was set up to “create a network of volunteers to visit USHCN climate-monitoring stations and document, with photographs and site surveys, their quality.” (Pg. 8)