by Ben Bova
“How do we get the hydrogen out of it?” O’Connor asked.
“Lase it. That’ll break it up into hydrogen and carbon. The carbon precipitates out, leaving the hydrogen for us to feed to the fuel cell.
Bernstein shook his head. “How’re we going to capture the methane in the first place? And how are we going to repair the fuel cell’s damage?”
“We can weld a patch on the cell,” O’Connor said. “We’ve got the tools for that.”
“And we can attach a weather balloon to the bore hole. That’ll hold the methane coming out.”
“Yeah, but will it be enough to power up the fuel cell?”
“We’ll see.”
With Bernstein clearly doubtful, they broke into the equipment locker and pulled out the small, almost delicate, welding rod and supplies. Faiyum opened the bin that contained the weather balloons.
“The meteorologists aren’t going to like our using their stuff,” Bernstein said. “We’re supposed to be releasing these balloons twice a day.”
Before O’Connor could reply with a choice Fuck the meteorologists, Faiyum snapped, “Let ’em eat cake.”
They got to work. As team leader, O’Connor was glad of the excuse to be doing something. Even if this is a big flop, he thought, it’s better to be busy than to just lie around and wait to die.
As he stretched one of the weather balloons over the bore hole and fastened it in place, Faiyum kept up a steady stream of timeworn jokes. Bernstein groaned in the proper places and O’Connor sweated inside his suit while he laboriously welded the bullet-hole-sized puncture of the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank.
By midafternoon the weather balloon was swelling nicely.
“How much hydrogen do you think we’ve got there?” Bernstein wondered.
“Not enough,” said Faiyum, serious for once. “We’ll need three, four balloons full. Maybe more.”
O’Connor looked westward, out across the bleak frozen plain. The sun would be setting in another couple of hours.
When they finished their day’s work and clambered back into the cockpit, O’Connor saw that the batteries were barely up to half their standard power level, even with the solar panels recharging them all day.
We’re not going to make it, he thought. But he said nothing. He could see that the other two stared at the battery readout. No one said a word, though.
The night was worse than ever. O’Connor couldn’t sleep. The cold hurt. He had turned off his suit radio, so he couldn’t tell if the other two had drifted off to sleep. He couldn’t. He knew that when a man froze to death, he fell asleep first. Not a bad way to die, he said to himself. As if there’s a good way.
He was surprised when the first rays of sunlight woke him. I fell asleep anyway. I didn’t die. Not yet.
Faiyum wasn’t in the cockpit, he saw. Looking blearily through the windshield he spotted the geologist in the early morning sun fixing a fresh balloon to the bore hole, with a big round yellow balloon bobbing from a rock he’d tied it to.
O’Connor saw Faiyum waving to him and gesturing to his left wrist, then remembered that he had turned his suit radio off. He clicked the control stud on his wrist.
“… damned near ready to burst,” Faiyum was saying. “Good thing I came out here in time.”
Bernstein was lying back in his cranked-down seat, either asleep or … O’Connor nudged his shoulder. No reaction. He shook the man harder.
“Wha … what’s going on?”
O’Connor let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“I gotta take a crap.”
O’Connor giggled. He’s all right. We made it through the night. But then he turned to the control panel and saw that the batteries were down to zero.
Faiyum and Bernstein spent the day building a system of pipes that led from the balloon’s neck to the input valve of the repaired fuel cell’s hydrogen tank. As long as the sun was shining they had plenty of electricity to power the laser. Faiyum fastened the balloon’s neck to one of the hopper’s spidery little landing legs and connected it to the rickety-looking pipework. Damned contraption’s going to leak like a sieve, O’Conner thought. Hydrogen’s sneaky stuff.
As he worked he kept up his patter of inane jokes. “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew—”
“How come the Jew is always last on your list?” Bernstein asked, from his post at the fuel cell. O’Connor saw that the hydrogen tank was starting to fill.
Faiyum launched into an elaborate joke from the ancient days of the old Soviet Union, in which Jews were turned away from everything from butcher’s shops to clothing stores.
“They weren’t even allowed to stand in line,” he explained as he held the bobbing balloon by its neck. “So when the guys who’ve been waiting in line at the butcher’s shop since sunrise are told that there’s no meat today, one of them turns to another and says, ‘See, the Jews get the best of everything!’”
“I don’t get it,” Bernstein complained.
“They didn’t have to stand in line all day.”
“Because they were discriminated against.”
Faiyum shook his head. “I thought you people were supposed to have a great sense of humor.”
“When we hear something funny.”
O’Connor suppressed a giggle. Bernstein understood the joke perfectly well, he thought, but he wasn’t going to let Faiyum know it.
By the time the sun touched the horizon again, the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank was half full and the hopper’s batteries were totally dead.
O’Connor called Tithonium. “We’re going to run on the fuel cell tonight.”
For the first time since he’d known her, Gloria Hazeltine looked surprised. “But I thought your fuel cell was dead.”
“We’ve resurrected it,” O’Connor said happily. “We’ve got enough hydrogen to run the heaters most of the night.”
“Where’d you get the hydrogen?” Glory Hallelujah was wide-eyed with curiosity.
“Bug farts,” shouted Faiyum, from over O’Connor’s shoulder.
They made it through the night almost comfortably and spent the next day filling balloons with methane, then breaking down the gas into its components and filling the fuel cell’s tank with hydrogen.
By the time the relief ship from Tithonium landed beside their hopper, O’Connor was almost ready to wave them off and return to the base on their own power.
Instead, though, he spent the day helping his teammates and the two-man crew of the relief ship attach the storage racks with their previous ice core onto the bigger vehicle.
As they took off for Tithonium, five men jammed into the ship’s command deck, O’Connor felt almost sad to be leaving their little hopper alone on the frigid plain. Almost. We’ll be back, he told himself. And we’ll salvage the Viking 2 lander when we return.
Faiyum showed no remorse about leaving at all. “A Jew, a Catholic, and a Muslim walk into a bar.”
“Not another one,” Bernstein groused.
Undeterred, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The bartender takes one look at them and says, ‘What is this, a joke?’”
Even Bernstein laughed.
INTRODUCTION TO
“A PALE BLUE DOT”
Galileo wrote, “Astronomers … seek to investigate the true constitution of the universe—the most important and most admirable problem that there is.”
Looking across the frontier of space, astronomers have found in recent years thousands of planets orbiting other stars. But so far, none of these exoplanets resembles Earth very closely. No one has yet found a “pale blue dot” like our own planet out among the stars.
Not yet.
But the search goes on, year by patient year, using constantly better instruments and ideas. Sky-scanning telescopes dot mountaintops all across our world. Telescopes have been placed in space, to look farther and better.
And as the frontiers of knowledge and discovery move on, the searc
h for a pale blue dot continues.
The most important and most admirable problem that there is.
A PALE BLUE DOT
TOM DANIELS TIPTOED down the shadowy concrete corridor toward the door marked STAFF ONLY.
This is cool, he said to himself. Like a spy or a detective or something.
He was celebrating his fifteenth birthday in his own way. All summer long he’d been stuck here at the observatory. His father had said it would be fun, but Tom wished he’d stayed back home with Mom and all his friends. There weren’t any other kids at the observatory, nobody his own age anywhere nearby. And there wasn’t much for a bright, curious fifteen-year-old to do, either.
He remembered last summer, when he’d stayed home with Mom. At least at home I could go out in the backyard at night and look at the sky. He remembered the meteor shower that had filled the night with blazing streaks of falling stars.
No meteor showers here, he thought. Not this summer. Not ever.
Sure, Dad tried to find busywork for him. Check the auxiliary battery packs for the computers. Handle the e-mail going back to the university. If that was fun, Tom thought, then having pneumonia must be hysterical.
There was one time, though, when Dad let him come into the telescope control center and look at the images the big ’scopes were getting. That was way cool. Stars and more stars, big groady clouds of glowing gas hanging out there in deep space. Better than cool. Radical.
That was what Tom wanted. To be in on the excitement. To discover something that nobody had ever seen before.
But Dad was too busy to let Tom back into the control center again. He was in charge of building the new telescope, the one that everybody said would be powerful enough to see Earth-sized planets orbiting around other stars. Other worlds like Earth.
All the observatory’s telescopes were searching for planets circling around other stars. They had found plenty of them, too: giant worlds, all of them much bigger than Earth. None of them had an ocean of blue water. None had fleecy white clouds and an atmosphere rich with oxygen. No “pale blue dot” like Earth.
Dad said this new ’scope just might be able to find a pale blue dot out there among the stars: a pale blue dot like Earth.
So Tom tiptoed to the locked steel door, all alone in the middle of the night, determined to celebrate his birthday in his own way.
He had memorized the lock’s electronic code long ago. Now he tapped the keypad set into the concrete wall and heard its faint beeps. For a moment nothing happened, then the door clicked open.
What if somebody’s in the control center? Tom asked himself. What if Dad’s in there? I’m supposed to be asleep in my bunk.
He shook his head. None of the astronomers worked this late at night unless something special was going on. The big telescopes outside were all automated; the computers collected the images they saw and recorded all the data. Only if something unusual happened would anybody get out of bed and come down here.
He hoped.
Pushing through the heavy steel door, Tom saw that the control center really was empty. Even the ceiling lights were off; the only light in the cramped little room came from the computer screens, flickering off the walls in an eerie greenish glow.
The big display screen on the wall showed the telescopes outside, big spidery frameworks of steel and aluminum pointing out at the black night sky.
His heart thumping faster than usual, Tom went straight to the console where the new telescope was controlled. He sat in the little wheeled chair, just as his father would. For a moment he hesitated, then, licking his lips nervously, he booted up the computer.
“Happy birthday to me,” Tom whispered as the screen lit up and showed a display of icons.
Dad’s going to be pretty sore when he finds out I used the new ’scope before anybody else, Tom thought. But if I discover something, something new and important, maybe he won’t get so mad. Maybe I can find the pale blue dot he’s been looking for.
Tom knew the telescope was already focused on a particular planet orbiting a distant star. He leaned forward in his chair and pecked at the keyboard to get some pictures on the screen. Up came an image of the planet that was being observed by the new telescope: a big slightly flattened sphere covered with gaudy stripes and splotches of color. Along the bottom of the screen a data bar showed what the telescope’s sensors had determined: the planet’s size, its density, the chemical elements it was made of.
Tom saw that the planet was a lot like Jupiter, but much bigger. A huge gas giant of a planet, without even a solid surface to it. So very different from Earth. Seven hundred light years away. He calculated quickly in his head: That’s forty-two trillion miles. I’m seeing this planet the way it looked seven hundred years ago; it’s taken light that many years to cross the distance from there to here.
Then his breath caught in his throat. From behind the curve of the planet’s rim, Tom saw something new appearing.
A moon, he realized. It had been hidden behind the planet’s huge bulk. Glancing at the data bar he saw that this moon was almost the same size as Earth. And it gleamed a faint, soft blue.
A pale blue dot! As the distant moon moved clear of the planet it orbited, Tom saw a world that looked like Earth.
He yanked the phone from its holder and punched out his father’s number. “Dad! Come quick! Quick!”
Before his father could ask a question Tom hung up, bent forward in his chair, staring at this distant blue world.
Then he looked again at the data bar. This world showed no water. No oxygen. The blue color was from methane, a deadly unbreathable gas.
His father burst into the data center. “What is it, Tom? What’s wrong?”
Feeling almost ashamed, Tom showed him the display screen. “I thought I’d found a world like Earth,” he said, crushingly disappointed.
“What are you doing in here?” his father demanded. “You ought to be in bed, asleep.”
“I…” Tom took a deep breath. “I’m celebrating my birthday.”
“Your birthday? That’s not until tomorrow.”
“It’s past midnight, Dad.”
Dad’s frown melted slowly into a smile. “Yes, so it is. Well, happy birthday, son.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I had a surprise party arranged for you,” Dad said, almost wistfully. “With a videophone call arranged from your mother and sister.”
Tom tried not to laugh. “I guess I surprised you, instead.”
“I guess you did.”
Dad spent almost half an hour studying Tom’s discovery.
“Well, it’s not like Earth is now,” he said at last, “but Earth had a lot of methane in its atmosphere a few billion years ago.”
“It did?” Tom brightened a little.
“Yes, back when life first began on our world.”
“So this world is like ours was, way back then?”
“Perhaps,” his father said. “You’ve made a real discovery, Thomas. This is the first world we’ve found that could become Earthlike, in a few billion years. By studying this world we might be able to learn a lot more about our own.”
“Really?”
Dad was grinning broadly now. “We’ll have to write a paper for the journal about this.”
“We? You mean, us?”
“You made the discovery, didn’t you? Daniels and Daniels, coauthors.”
“Wow!”
The two of them worked side by side for several more hours, using the telescope’s sensors to measure as much as they could about this distant new world.
Finally, as the morning shift started coming into the center, Tom asked, “Have you ever made a big discovery, Dad?”
His father shook his head and smiled sorrowfully. “Can’t say that I have, Tom. I’ve put my whole life into astronomy, but I’ve never made what you could call a big discovery.”
Tom nodded glumly.
“But here you are, fifteen years old, and you’ve already made a significa
nt discovery. You’re going to make a fine astronomer, my boy.”
“I don’t know if I want to be an astronomer,” Tommy said.
His father looked shocked. “Why not?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “I was lucky tonight, I guess. But is it really worth all the work? Night after night, day after day? I mean, you’ve spent your whole life being an astronomer, and it hasn’t made you rich or famous, has it?”
“No, it hasn’t,” his father admitted.
“And it keeps you away from Mom and us kids a lot of the time. Far away.”
“That’s true enough.”
“So what good is it? What does astronomy do for us?”
Dad gave him a funny look. Getting up from the computer, he said, “Let’s take a walk outside.”
“Outside?” That surprised Tom.
He followed his father down the bare concrete corridor and they struggled into their outdoor suits.
“Science is like a great building, Tom,” Dad said as he opened the inner hatch. “Like a cathedral that’s still being built, one brick at a time. You added a new brick tonight.”
“One little brick,” Tom mumbled.
“That’s the way it’s built, son. One little brick adds to all the others.”
Dad swung the outer hatch open. “But there’s always so much more to learn. The cathedral isn’t finished yet. Perhaps it never will be.”
They stepped outside onto the barren dusty ground. Through the visor of his helmet Tom saw the spidery frameworks of the Lunar Farside Observatory’s giant telescopes rising all around them. And beyond stretched the universe of stars, thousands, millions of stars glowing in the eternal night of deep space, looking down on the battered face of the Moon where they stood.
Tom felt a lump in his throat. “Maybe I’ll stick with astronomy, after all,” he said to his father. And he thought it might be fun to add a few more bricks to the cathedral.
AFTERWORD TO
“A PALE BLUE DOT”
This story was inspired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who in 1967 discovered the first pulsar while she was doing “grunge work” as a graduate student at Cambridge University. Pulsars are collapsed stars that emit powerful pulses of radio energy.
