Someone asks, “Do we even know if any of our weapons will work? I mean, they can plow through gas giants, right?”
Nolan says, “Think of their spacecraft like a police officer holding a ballistic shield. A frontal assault is pointless. An assault there will only reinforce their resolve. Our only chance is from the side or the rear.”
“Even that might be futile,” the lead engineer says. “To be effective, you probably need to detonate inside the thing, which makes all this even more insanely complicated.”
Nolan shrugs. He may well be right.
Several other attendees have questions. Some of them are scientists, others are fellow engineers, but there are also executives, project officers, and line-managers. They’re not experts. They’re the people who coordinate experts. As far as Nolan is concerned, they should shut the fuck up. An argument brews, with the lead engineer being forced to defend his position.
“We must address these issues! Physics doesn’t care about timelines or agendas.”
The dynamic shifts. People are getting frustrated. Nolan has already identified a couple of cliques. They’re all supposed to be here to protect Earth, but the meeting degenerates into a turf war.
General Cooper tries to focus the discussion. “Okay. We have a problem. We have a weapon we need to use but can’t. Have I got that right?”
Someone starts waffling on about payload delivery.
Nolan’s past caring about pleasantries. He cuts the man off, saying, “We need to control the high ground.”
His statement is out of context. No one’s sure what he means. Even the lead engineer on the orbital missile project seems confused.
“Space isn’t flat,” Nolan says, wrestling control of the meeting away from the technical debates. “We live at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s like living at the bottom of a hill.”
“So we locate these things in space?” General Cooper says. From his tone of voice, it’s clear he thinks that’s obvious, but that’s not what Nolan means.
“We’ve missed the big picture,” he says. “It’s not a question of putting missiles in subs or on an orbital platform. If anything, that increases the risk of shrapnel locking us in, right? We’ve got to dominate the high ground.”
“I’m confused,” the general says. “If being in orbit isn’t the high ground, what is? The Moon?”
“Not quite,” Nolan replies, getting to his feet. He squeezes past a few people to join the engineer at the front of the room.
“May I?” he asks, pointing at the whiteboard.
“Sure,” the engineer says, rubbing it clean.
Nolan draws a circle representing Earth orbiting the Moon.
“Has anyone here ever gone wakesurfing?” he asks. No one replies. “You’ve got a bunch of reservoirs, lakes, and rivers around here, right? Lake Powell. The Rio Grande.” Heads nod around the room, but no one offers any personal anecdotes. “Has anyone gone wakesurfing on them?”
A lone hand is raised at the far end of the room. A young woman in civilian clothing keeps her hand below shoulder height.
“Good, good,” Nolan says. In a kind voice, he asks, “Can you explain wakesurfing to the rest of us?”
Nolan’s ready to jump in with an explanation if she falters, but his question is designed to engage. He’s a stranger at Los Alamos. As far as most of the people here are concerned, he’s one of those NORAD generals with phallic missile infatuation—the bigger and harder, the better. He’s trying to change that misconception.
Nolan turns his back to the meeting attendees, adding several lines to his drawing.
“Ah, wakesurfing is like regular surfing,” the woman says. “Except, instead of riding a wave on the ocean, you’re surfing on the wake of a speedboat.”
“Exactly,” he says, adding a couple of dots to his diagram. “If you can surf, I recommend wakesurfing. You just stand there on your board, riding the wave kicked up by the speedboat. Surfing in California, I’d catch waves that lasted maybe a minute. When you’re wakesurfing, you can ride a wave for four or five minutes. Essentially, you’re standing still relative to the boat. No rope or anything. You hang back a few feet, riding the wave as the boat races over the lake. You’re surfing the wave kicked up by the speedboat.”
General Cooper’s brow is furrowed, but he knows Nolan. This is important. Like everyone else, he’s waiting for the ah-ha moment.
Nolan adds five dots and numbers them.
“The Moon throws up a gravitational wake as it orbits Earth.”
“It’s difficult to depict in a drawing, but remember the Moon is in motion. All of these points are moving. They’re being dragged around Earth. All five of them are being tugged by Earth and the Moon. That tug-o-war causes what’s known as Lagrange points. These are gravitationally neutral positions in space.”
He taps the whiteboard.
“These are the high ground. If you park a spaceship at these points, it’ll coast, riding through space like a surfer riding a wake.”
A few of the engineers talk in hushed whispers.
Nolan says, “From these points, you can go anywhere with very little energy. One, two, and three are small and slightly unstable. Anything at four and five will be stable for millions of years.”
One of the dissenters from earlier says, “I don’t see how this solves our problem. If anything, firing from these hilltops would be worse. The orbital paths would be more complex depending on the direction you launch in.”
“They’re better,” the lead engineer says as he studies the diagram. “At least from there we have some predictability.”
“Oh, I think you misunderstand me,” Nolan says, tapping numbers one, four, and five. “I think this is where they’re going.”
For a moment, there’s no noise beyond the hum of the air conditioning. Nolan pushes the lid back on the marker.
General Cooper says, “We need a presence in each of those locations.”
“Exactly,” Nolan says. “We’re thinking too small. We’re thinking like the Earthbound species we are. It takes a herculean effort for us just to get into orbit. We assume any action will occur right over our heads, but that’s not going to be the case. They’re not going to park a few hundred kilometers above the surface or even up in a stationary orbit. An interstellar spacecraft is likely to position itself hundreds of thousands of kilometers above Earth. They’re not going to play nice and close. They’ll dominate one of these points of stability.”
The wakesurfing consultant at the back of the room mutters, “We are so fucked.”
Nolan laughs, appreciating her candor.
“Oh, we are. This is our battle sphere. The problem is, we can barely leave the planet with anything of size.”
He taps at the number five, saying, “Getting out here is tough. The further we go, the lighter the payload. We’re trying to ski uphill.”
General Cooper addresses the room.
“This is why you’re here. We need to figure this out. Workshop this thing. I don’t want problems. I want solutions. Figure out that damn orbital debris issue. Figure out what we can use as a weapon. Figure out how we can get to these points in space. I want goddamn answers.”
A murmur of agreement ripples around the room.
General Cooper brings the meeting to a close by barking, “Dismissed!”
Two Days from Jupiter
Kath adjusts her computer screen. She makes sure the webcam catches her face correctly and doesn’t cut her off at her bangs.
“Two days out,” Sara Hendi says from her office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “An̆duru is right on track to skip across Jupiter. I make the angle of incidence less than ten percent. An̆duru’s coming in on the ecliptic. It'll strike the equatorial zone. There are lots of high-altitude clouds in that region. The white ammonia ice crystals will give us some really good imagery. The contact heat is going to vaporize the ice and expose the underlying dark sulfides. We should get a really good view of the pr
essure wave. That will allow us to calculate the impact energy with a lot more precision than we had out at Saturn.”
“It’s not aliens,” Kath says.
“It never is,” Sara replies, laughing.
“Until it is,” Pete Conrad says from the Operations Support Center in the Atacama Desert. He’s 14,000 feet above sea level in the Andes.
He switches to a live view of the ALMA array. Silver radio telescope dishes dot the desolate plain. Frost blankets the desert, reflecting sunlight. The distant hills are red and clear of ice at this time of year. It looks as though he’s on another planet.
“How’s the weather there on Hoth?” Professor José Alvarez asks from the European Space Agency. Although it’s summer in Chile, the temperature drops below freezing at night. It takes most of the day to warm up.
José is in Brussels, where winter has fallen. The trees outside his office window have lost their leaves. Although they’re half a world apart, both locations are roughly the same temperature.
“Oh, it’s brisk,” Pete says.
“So when do we call it?” José asks. “When do we say for sure this thing is an alien spacecraft?”
“It’s a little late for that,” Sara replies. “It’s all the media talks about these days.”
“I know. I know. But when do we call it? When do we make it official?”
Pete says, “If it survives this encounter and deviates toward us, we have a bona fide extraterrestrial object inbound.”
Kath nods.
Sara asks, “Are we ever going to call it a UFO?”
In unison, everyone on the call says, “No!”
“Alright,” Kath says. “So you’re an alien scientist. You’ve spotted Earth through a telescope. You have the opportunity to send an interstellar probe across star systems on a journey that spans generations. What equipment do you put onboard?”
“My first concern,” José says, “would be redundancy. Why send one probe? We sent Pioneer 10 and 11 to the gas giants, followed closely by Voyager 1 and 2.”
“So you think there’s a second An̆duru out there somewhere?” Kath asks, surprised by the notion. “Wouldn’t we have seen it?”
“Not necessarily. In the 1970s, NASA’s Voyager launches were separated by a mere two weeks. They followed slightly different trajectories and are now separated by trillions of miles!”
Kath makes a note. “Okay, so you think we should be looking for An̆duru 2 on some other inbound course?”
“It’s a fair bet,” Sara says. “We would never limit a high-value science target to a single mission.”
“There was only ever one Cassini,” Kath counters. “Or one New Horizons.”
“Whenever we can,” Sarah says, “we double up. Think about Mars. Viking 1 and 2. Spirit and Opportunity. Sometimes the duplication is in terms of sequential missions as technology develops. Perseverance followed Curiosity using the same chassis design. Single missions are the exception.”
“Oh, the conspiracy theorists are going to love this one,” Pete says. “Here comes the invasion fleet!”
“Let’s keep this quiet,” Kath says, trying not to laugh. “We need to make sure we keep an eye out for any other inbound objects, but without raising any alarms.”
“On it,” José says. “I’ve got Morrison at the Vera Rubin asking how he can help. I’ll get him to do an extra-solar survey looking for anything passing through the Oort cloud.”
Pete says, “They may have a single mission with onboard redundancy, like the ability to 3D print parts. That might give them the confidence to send just one spacecraft.”
“And the payload?” Kath asks. “What instruments would you expect?”
Sara says. “They’re going to need radar imaging to look below the clouds. They’ll be interested in our geology. They’ll probably look for plate tectonics. They’ll be curious about how aeolian and fluvial processes have shaped the land. Ground-penetrating radar would reveal a lot of this. It would also pick up artificial structures such as buildings and archeological sites. When they see those, there will be no doubt about the existence of a civilization down here.
“We’ve got to remember, for them, all this is new. Features we take for granted, like geothermal regions, are going to fascinate them as they consider how life first arose here.”
“Will there be a lander?” Kath asks. “Or is An̆duru just an orbiter?”
No one can answer that question. Yet. Kath’s interested in the perspective of her science team. She has her own thoughts on this, but she wants their input.
Pete says, “A lander is going to be difficult but not impossible. From that distance, they’d have a fair idea about our atmospheric composition. They’ve probably mapped seasonal temperature variations. They’d have an estimate for Earth’s gravitational pull. All this would give them some idea about our weather and the kind of corrosives that might damage a lander.”
José says, “Honestly, if there’s a lander, it would be a secondary mission objective. I can’t see it being a primary. There’s too much risk of losing the craft.”
“A lander is going to add a lot of complexity,” Sara suggests. “Essentially, you’ve got to have two separate spacecraft, one piggybacking on the other, like Cassini dropping Huygens on Titan.”
“It’s an opportunity they wouldn’t want to miss,” Pete says. “Big risk, yes, but there’s also a big reward. They know there’s life down here. You can’t observe life from orbit, not beyond noting things like forests or algae blooms. Nah, if they’re coming all this way, they’re going to want to examine life in detail.”
Sara says, “They’ll probably opt for an equatorial landing. Less seasonal variation. Easier to predict environmental factors.”
Kath asks, “So if there’s a lander, what approach would you expect? Are we talking something that’s static? Would it be like Viking? Landing and staying in one location? Or would it be a rover? Or perhaps something airborne? Would they explore the seas or the land? Given 70% of our surface is covered in water, they might not expect to find life on land.”
Sara nods, agreeing with that point. “It took more than three billion years for complex life to evolve on Earth. It took another couple of hundred million for that to migrate to the land. Sampling our oceans wouldn’t be a bad assumption on their part.”
“Have we considered what they’ve already seen?” José asks. “I mean, they saw something, right? They looked from afar and spotted life down here. What did they see?”
“Bio-signatures. Possibly photosynthesis,” Pete says. “Algae blooms are big enough to influence the light spectrum reflecting off the ocean.”
“So their lander might be a splasher?” Kath says. “Something like a boat or a submersible?”
“They might have something amphibious,” Sara says. She holds up a model of the Perseverance rover with its six rocker-bogie wheels and extension arm. “We take target selection pretty seriously here at JPL. When going to Mars, there are a lot of considerations. We want to maximize our time in the target zone. It’s not enough to pack a rover with instruments. We have to be able to navigate the terrain and avoid anything that might threaten the longevity of the mission.
“I suspect they’ll have thought carefully about their mission goals and duration. They’ll have a lower and upper bound on what they want to accomplish. Like us, they’ll want to minimize the risk of microbial contamination. That might limit the tech put onboard.
"All missions come with a degree of uncertainty. They won’t have rushed this.”
She puts the model down.
“I doubt they have specific targets. I suspect they’ll have some kind of onboard decision-making process, something like an AI that’s going to make the final call.”
“So no crew?” Kath asks. There’s silence, which surprises her. Kath expected them to jump on this line of reasoning. She’s thought long and hard about it, but she wants to hear their thoughts.
“It’s the trade-off that has me worr
ied about that,” Pete says. “If they’re coming in hot, using the gas giants to shed their speed, they’ve got serious concerns about fuel. I suspect they’ve squeezed every ounce onto that craft. Nothing’s been wasted. No excess. No room for a crew.”
Kath nods but doesn’t respond, waiting for the others to contribute.
José says, “I’m with Pete on this one. The force-load when passing through the clouds on Saturn has got to be 50 to 60 gees. Any organics would be turned into spaghetti.”
“So we think it’s piloted by AI?” Kath asks.
When there’s no response, she asks the question that’s been bugging her. The President was quite clear about this issue, but she wants the opinion of her science team.
“How do we talk to them?”
No one answers. They’re all there on the screen in front of her, but no one wants to speak, which confuses her.
“What’s the problem?” she asks.
Pete is the first one to reply, but his question floors her.
“Who’s we?”
“W—What?”
“We’re divided,” José says. As he speaks, Kath realizes they’ve already discussed this between themselves. “We’re a single species divided into warring factions. Who should speak to them? The American President? The Security Council? The United Nations General Assembly?”
“Even that kind of thinking is too small,” Pete says. “We’re more than nation-states. When we ask who should speak for us we need to consider what defines us. Scientists, representing our collective reasoning? Political leaders, representing our social structures? Or religious leaders, representing the vast majority of humanity?”
Sara says, “Who’s to say we won’t all speak at once? I mean, it’s not like the Russians and the Chinese are going to line up behind us. They’re not going to be polite and wait their turn. Pete’s right. Sooner or later, religious beliefs and political ideologies are going to muddy the waters. Our words are layered at the best of times. What will they make of us? How well will our words line up with our actions? Often, it’s what’s not said that’s more important. This is a minefield, Kath.”
Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact) Page 10
