Analog SFF, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Greetings, Rariil, honorable mate of Graashah. My name is Gary. I meekly greet you and ask that you share your food, if you have any to spare.” The stone in the man's hand spoke in choppy but understandable polar bear. The sour scent of submission was perfect.

  Rariil dropped to all fours in disbelief. He understood the words, but they didn't make any sense. Graashah must have taught him the traditional greeting for a submissive bear begging food from a dominant one. He didn't know how to respond, and it made him angry. Now we'll have to listen, and they'll know we understand, he thought. These pale-skinned men always step directly upwind.

  "He's too small to fight,” said Graashah, sniffing to understand the cause of Rariil's confusion. “Let's go. I need to mate."

  Rariil smelled her heat rising. His body tensed. Bears were always upwind of men when it came to size and respect for tradition. A polar bear fights for mating privileges. The begging was offensive, no matter the language used to offer it.

  Grrary remained prostrate in the wet snow, all puffed up with fake blubber. “I'm here to respect..."

  Rariil snorted, lowered his head, and charged.

  Graashah roared, “Grrary!” and ran at Rariil.

  Grrary's stone must have smelled Rariil's aggression. He was already up, pulling a tranquilizer gun from between his knees. The dart stung Rariil's chest seconds before Graashah tackled him. She held him down, and he fell deeply asleep.

  Rariil woke up on ice, knowing he'd fought Grrary and lost. By tradition he should now be looking for another mate, but Graashah was nearby. They were alone as far as he could smell. There was only one thing to do. He followed her footprints from where they began, next to the stick bug rails’ impressions in the snow.

  Graashah was still-hunting when he found her. Chin at the edge of a seal's breathing hole, she lay on the ice as if asleep. Rariil waited at a distance until a seal popped up. Graashah bit its head, pulled it onto the ice, and killed it with a hard shake. She noticed him when she started to eat and growled a warning. Rariil stayed back. She'd need the blubber for her pregnancy.

  They mated, wandered, and hunted together for days. The sun arced across the sky ten times before they got to the edge of the ice. Graashah would leave for her den soon. Rariil wondered if she would walk or if Grrary would pick her up.

  "Will our cubs beg for food, or will you teach them hunt?” he barked when he saw how she watched the sky.

  "They'll live on the preserve full time after they're weaned. Bears like you will teach them the traditional ways as they get older on the ice."

  Rariil grunted. “Men always step directly upwind. They'll insist on driving around your preserve in their rolling metal bugs, making noise and flashing lights, careless of the wind. Their petroleum and piss stench will drive traditional bears away. You can't keep your dignity in a situation like that."

  Graashah growled. Rariil smelled her impatience. “The frozen part of the world is shrinking. We need to work with men if we want to remain as we are: beautiful white bears living on and from the sea. I'll feed my cubs through their weaning whether the blubber is given by Grrary or hunted by me. Seals won't swim into our paws. We need ice to hunt."

  "Let me show you something.” Rariil pushed himself into the sea, chest first.

  Graashah paddled after him into the open water. When they got a little more than halfway to shore, Rariil said, “Spread your arms and float. Be as still as you can. Clear your mind. Smell like ice.” His back and rump gleamed white against the dark green water. Though the water was calm, it took some effort to keep his nose above the surface. The rich saltwater smell filled his nostrils, and he imagined himself frozen, distilled from the sea.

  The sun moved a short way across the sky before a pod of seals swam past. Their slick, dark heads broke the surface here and there. Rariil made no move to follow them; tradition held it better to wait quietly. He was tempted by the thought that two strong kicks would bring them into reach. But seals were snagged by their curiosity or their need to rest and breathe.

  Soon the seals came back. They swam around him, just out of reach, long enough to try his patience and his strength. He concentrated, tried to tangle them in his thoughts, willing them into his reach. Finally, one swam to Rariil's arm and touched it with a fin, testing it as a place to haul out and rest. Rariil quickly folded the seal to his chest and bit its head, killing it in the traditional way. He rolled and tore into the seal, holding it steady with his paws over his stomach.

  "The seals need ice to rest. We can be that ice. Teach the cubs.” Rariil tossed the half-eaten seal to Graashah. She floated nearby, nodding. The sea smell overpowered her scent, so Rariil couldn't tell what she was thinking.

  They began the long swim back. It took more out of a bear to float still than it did to lie on the ice. Fatigued, he searched the horizon for the white line that meant rest. He heard the spinney stick bug long before he saw it. Graashah stopped swimming and floated, waiting for her man. Rariil swam past her, still heading for shore.

  He heard the bug stop to hover over Graashah. He rolled to his back, hoping for a short rest and curious about how Grrary would pick Graashah up from the sea. Grrary leaned from the bug's open door, aiming a large gun that rested on his shoulder. He pointed it a Graashah. It fired with a loud pop.

  Rariil saw a net fly from the muzzle and land in the water. Graashah swam into it and carefully pushed her arms through two of the net's holes. Slowly, she was lifted out of the water toward Grrary. Rariil stared in disbelief. Surely they both knew it was illegal to trap a polar bear. Graashah relaxed into the net. The scent of her relief blew past him on the wind pushed by the bug's rotors. It couldn't be a trap if it was consensual. Rariil rolled back over to resume his swim.

  The wind from the rotors suddenly began beating on his back. The water whipped into a choppy froth, making it more difficult to swim. Rariil roared his frustration and then choked when his mouth filled with water. The net hit the water in front of him. He turned to swim away, felt the angle of the rotor wind change, and his back legs snagged in the net being pulled up behind him. Rariil rolled to tear at the net with his claws, but his arm got tangled. A gentle pull wrapped the net around him and pulled him out of the water.

  Rariil struggled and the net swung wide arcs, pulling the bug from side to side. He was on his back staring up at the bug and the sky beyond it.

  "I am trapped!” he roared in polar bear. “You take me against my will!” He thrashed again, and the bug tilted toward the water.

  "If you don't quit struggling, the copter will crash and we'll all drown. Let us take you to the ice. You won't make it on your own.” Grrary's speaking stone sounded from the bug, unnaturally loud.

  Rariil twisted around to see the ice still far away on the horizon. What the man said made sense. His energy drained away with his adrenaline, and he brayed his resignation. The man might not understand, but Graashah would.

  They laid him gently on the ice and remotely unclipped their line from the net before flying away. Rariil lay still for a while, feeling the net press into his back. He'd almost swum into his nanulak nightmare. An open water still-hunt could kill if it took too long or didn't bring in enough blubber to fuel the swim back.

  The frozen part of the world was shrinking. It was now necessary to listen to men, and there was a reason to speak to them. The terms of a polar preserve would need to be negotiated. Kodiaks would leave them alone if the distance across the ice was great enough. Polars on the preserve shouldn't have to compete for blubber and space against nanulaks, who could never bear or sire cubs.

  Rariil rolled over and stood up. The net draped over his back, hanging on him like a parka on an Inupiat. He shrugged. The net slid easily off his arms and legs to pile around his feet. Offended by its human smells, he tore at it with his longest claw, cutting it in half. He paused, remembering how it so gently entangled him. A net this small could be easily shrugged off and held the water. He could use it to snag seals from
an arm's length away, or bring in two seals at once. Rariil grinned. An open water still-hunt could make a bear fat, if the conditions were right. This was something to teach the cubs. Rariil kept his tongue in his mouth. It would take a while to get used to the smells.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Sarah K. Castle

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  Probability Zero: THE DINOSAURS OF EDEN by Darrell Schweitzer

  There really were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, exactly as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky would have us believe. Tyrannosaurus rex coexisted with lions. Diplodocus grazed alongside sheep. Duckbills delved in the swamps (for Eden had its moister parts to accommodate such creatures) alongside actual ducks. All creatures great and small had come into being in the space of less than a week by acts of special creation, and they dwelt together happily in the Peaceable Kingdom, doing no violence to one another, although this caused some malnutrition among the T. rexes and Allosaurs because their long, daggerlike teeth were not really suitable for chewing grass.

  But there was harmony in the Garden, more or less, largely because the T. rex had a brain the size of a walnut and lacked the imagination to desire anything more.

  The problem was Man, or more precisely, Man and Woman, for male and female were they created, and they tended to get on each other's nerves. The Man talked too much. He berated the T-rex for having a brain the size of a walnut and for lack of imagination. The Woman, overhearing all this, took it as a veiled criticism of herself.

  It was the Woman who first ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which had been expressly forbidden by the Creator. (Later attempts to blame this on temptation by the Serpent have proven hard to verify, due to a lack of reliable witnesses.)

  "So,” she said to the Man, “if you're so smart, why don't you have a bite too?"

  "I think I will!” he replied, and he took from her the apple, and he did eat.

  The Tyrannosaurus stood by, gaping stupidly.

  "What are you staring at?” said the Man. “You've got a brain the size of a walnut. Here, try this. Maybe it'll make your brain grow a little."

  He tossed the remains of the forbidden fruit into the T. rex's gaping maw, and T. rex swallowed reflexively.

  All sorts of new knowledge flooded the minds of the Man and the Woman. They knew good and evil. They saw their nakedness and sought fig leaves. They understood that E equals MC squared.

  The T. rex however, having begun with a brain the size of a walnut, understood considerably less, but it did figure out what its long, sharp teeth were actually suited for, and it ate, and kept on eating, devouring first the Man and the Woman, then several other dinosaurs, and all the mammals save those so small they went skittering around its ankles; and when the Creator walked in the Garden and saw the results of the carnage (of which the T. rex was entirely unashamed, being too stupid to work out the finer philosophical implications), the only possible solution was to drive all the dinosaurs out of Eden and set an angel with a flaming sword to stand watch to make sure none of them got back in. (Dinosaurs may not be very bright, but they are impressed by flaming swords.)

  The Creator watched them go, knowing that they would rule the Earth for millions of years, rending the flesh of their fellows until the eventual extinction of all. Then He looked down upon the sorry remnants of the order Mammalia skittering around his ankles and said, “I think I'll try evolution next time."

  Copyright (c) 2008 Darrell Schweitzer

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  Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: THE FALLING DOMINOES: THE SOURCE OF ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY COSMIC RAYS by John G. Cramer

  Back in 1999, as the millennium was approaching, I wrote an AV column entitled “What We Don't Understand,” listing what I then considered to be the top seven major end-of-century unsolved problems in physics and astrophysics. Here is my 1999 list of problems: (1) vacuum energy and dark matter in cosmology; (2) the arbitrary parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics; (3) the origin of gamma ray bursts; (4) the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays; (5) the solar neutrino problem; (6) the origin of matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe; and (7) the origin of the arrow of time. That list was published about seven years ago, and in the intervening time, some of these unsolved problems have been falling like dominoes. In this column I want to describe our latest gain in understanding.

  The first falling domino was item five, the solar neutrino problem. It involved the discrepancy between the intensity of neutrinos from nuclear fusion in the Sun as predicted by our best astrophysics models and as measured with large underground neutrino detectors (which was about three times smaller). The SNO experiment in Sudbury, Canada solved this problem by measuring both the charged current and the neutral current interactions of solar neutrinos. This provided compelling evidence that neutrinos have a small mass (a few thousandths of an electron volt). Because neutrinos have mass, on their way from the Sun to the Earth about two thirds of the solar neutrinos “oscillate” from easy to detect electron neutrinos to hard to detect mu and tau neutrinos. The solar neutrino puzzle is resolved, but as is usual in science, its resolution raises new questions. (See my AV column in the July/August 2004 issue of Analog.)

  * * * *

  The next domino to fall was item three on my list, the origin of gamma ray bursts. Gamma ray bursts (GRB) were accidentally discovered in 1969 by the VELA military satellites. They were built to look for clandestine nuclear explosions, but instead they detected huge bursts of gamma radiation that occurred a few times per day and came from outside the solar system. The origin of these events, which became a major scientific mystery of twentieth century astrophysics, has now been identified. NASA's Swift satellite, launched in November 2004 for the explicit purpose of investing GRB, included a gamma ray detector to identify and locate the burst and to point onboard X-ray and optical telescopes in the burst direction in under a minute. Swift was able to observe the X-ray and optical components of such events even before the gamma ray emission had stopped. Distant galaxies were observed to “light up” in the visible and X-ray regions as they emitted these huge bursts of gamma radiation.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The conclusions are that the GRB sources are billions of light years away and that the majority of the long-duration GRB are probably the result of the core collapse of a rapidly rotating, high mass star into a black hole. Shorter duration GRB are believed to be caused by the “merging” of two neutron stars that spin down and collide. The details of gamma ray production are still a mystery however, because the observations do not fit well with theoretical models.

  * * * *

  Now problem four on my list, the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, has joined the group of falling dominoes. The Pierre Auger Collaboration announced last month in a paper published in the November 8, 2007 issue of Science that the source of these highest energy particles has been identified.

  Let me start by providing some background about cosmic rays. The most energetic particles observed come not from large particle accelerators, but from the cosmos itself. These particles from space, usually protons, have energies up to 10 billion times higher than the most energetic protons we can produce with particle accelerators. One super-energetic particle (probably a single proton) recorded at the Fly's Eye detector in Utah was estimated to have an energy of about 3x1020 electron volts (or 300 EeV). This is a huge amount of energy, which corresponds to 50 joules or the kinetic energy of a baseball thrown at 60 mph.

  In the past few years, the Pierre Auger Collaboration, an international consortium of universities and scientific institutions partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, has been building the Auger Observatory, an array of 1,600 large particle detectors spaced 1.5 kilometers apart and occupying 3,000 square kilometers of the Argentine pampas. The detector system is designed to record “extended air showers,” the large-area cascades of many thousands of particles cre
ated at ground level by a single ultra-energetic particle interacting with the upper atmosphere. In the past few years as it has come into operation, the Auger Observatory has recorded the arrival of 77 ultra-high-energy cosmic rays with energies in excess of 4.0x1019 electron volts (40 EeV), including 27 particles with energies in excess of 5.7x1019 electron volts (57 EeV).

  The observation of such ultra-high-energy (UHE) particles creates a problem. They should not be able to reach us unless they come from fairly nearby. The universe is permeated with cosmic microwave background radiation, low energy photons released about 500,000 years after the Big Bang, when the protons and electrons paired off and matter and light went their separate ways. Protons with energies above about five EeV, on colliding with these photons, should produce pi-mesons and should rapidly lose energy. This process, called the GZK cutoff, should result in a sharp drop in cosmic rays above five EeV. (See my column “Ultra-Energetic Cosmic Rays and Gamma Ray Bursts” in the January 1996 Analog.) This “cutoff” is not observed in the data, and more cosmic rays are observed above this energy than extrapolation from lower energies would predict. The only plausible resolution of this paradox is the assumption that these UHE particles are being produced relatively close to the Earth, within around 200 million light years.

  The universe is permeated with magnetic fields, and these fields bend the paths of cosmic ray charged particles at low energies. This deflection prevents backtracking these particles to see where they came from. However, as the cosmic ray particle energy goes up, the deflection goes down. The result is that when cosmic rays reach the 40 EeV level they can be backtracked to an accuracy of a few degrees, providing information on possible sources.