“I’ll thank both of you. You know what Uncle Dan said? He’s the air force colonel, the one from Baltimore who told you that the finest vocal group in the world was the Singing Sergeants, and that Wagner was a boring old weirdo.”
“I remember him. Rossini said much the same — about Wagner, I mean, not the Singing Sergeants. He said Wagner had beautiful moments, but awful quarter hours. He also said that he couldn’t judge Wagner’s Lohengrin from a single hearing, and he certainly didn’t intend hearing it a second time.”
“Ideas in the military don’t go away, ever, Uncle Dan says.” Ana wasn’t going to let Drake distract her with musical anecdotes. “Old ideas get put on the shelf, and when the right funding cycle comes around they’re dusted off and proposed again as new. I don’t believe a lot of what he tells me, but I believe that. Balance of terror didn’t start with Mutual Assured Destruction. And it won’t end with it. Bad ideas are still sitting there on the shelf.”
And sometimes they sit on that shelf for an awfully long time before they finally achieve their potential.
“I do not think that I am following you,” the ship said.
It was hardly surprising — Drake’s private thoughts had not been intended for anyone else. They had hopped randomly between past and present, and they included personal references that were surely not in any general database.
Drake addressed his remarks directly to the ship’s interface. “Mutual Assured Destruction is a very simple idea: I build huge weapons systems. So do you. Then you daren’t attack me, because if you do, I’ll attack you in return and you’ll die, too.” (He had killed Ana, and he had died, too. He had thought of his actions as Mutual Assured Survival. Did that make him any different from the Mutual Assured Destruction lunatics?) “So neither one of us dares to attack the other. It sounds as though it might work, but MAD has one fatal flaw. It produces an equilibrium between two groups, but it’s an unstable equilibrium. One accident, or even a misunderstanding, and both sides will use their weapons. They have to hit as hard as they can immediately, to neutralize as much of the other’s firepower as they can. Just as bad, a third group with very few weapons can force a misunderstanding and make the two big powers fight each other, by faking an attack of one on the other. I think we are looking at the results when MAD is applied on a huge scale. I think it killed that whole galaxy.”
“That cannot be true. Even now, I am detecting new superluminal messages. I cannot understand them, but it proves that intelligence continues to operate there.”
“Intelligence of a sort. Sometimes if an idea is old enough, it can seem brand new. I ought to have known what was going on ages ago, as soon as you told me that there were two distinct types of signals coming from this galaxy, and that you were unable to interpret either of them. You said that any signal at all should be intelligible to you. But suppose it was designed not to be understood by anyone without a suitable key? Suppose both sides were employing ciphers, codes that the other could not break.”
“Intentional obscurity. That is certainly possible. But what makes you so sure that the galaxy is dead? How can that be true, and the technology still be working?”
Drake realized that he could explain even that. His mind had thrown at him an image of a long-ago performance of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, of a conductor facing a group of players. In front of each stood a lighted candle. One by one, each musician finished his or her own orchestral part, snuffed out the candle, and left the stage. Finally the whole orchestra was gone. The conductor stood alone in darkness.
The ship was unlikely to benefit much from that thought. “Let me tell you what happened on Earth,” Drake said, “in the years just after I was born. Two great powers had been busy building up their nuclear weapons. The chance of all-out war seemed very high. That war, if it happened, would be short. A couple of hours and it would be all over. Missiles over the pole could be launched to reach any target within thirty minutes. The military on one side — our side, people would say, though I never thought of it as my side — decided that they must keep some kind of communications system working, even after the main war was over. They imagined a space-based command post, a whole constellation of special satellites in orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft would be completely operated by computers, and they would form a kind of central nervous system for all fighting, no matter when it happened. The system was called MILSTAR, for Military Strategic, Tactical, and Relay system, and it was supposed to be able to function even after the main spasm of war was over. The military planners didn’t intend for MILSTAR to help with civilian reconstruction. That wasn’t its job. They wanted it to handle military communications — and to be able to support fighting again, if necessary, months or years later. They wanted MIL-STAR ready to fight another war. It was designed to function even if all the surface command structures had been obliterated. It was supposed to be able to call on robot weaponry, whether or not there were humans around.”
The image came again. The conductor stood facing a full complement of players. As the military .powers on land, sea, and air were snuffed out by enemy action, MILSTAR continued, organizing and optimizing resources that became smaller every second. Finally, the stage held nothing but orchestral desks and empty instrument cases. The conductor waved his baton over a vanished army of players. MILSTAR floated serenely on through space, its communications system in full working order and ready to shape a second symphony of Armageddon.
“The MILSTAR satellites had to be very sophisticated. They needed a long operating lifetime. They had to be mobile, to avoid direct missile attack; durable, to operate for years without a single human mind to direct them; robust, to survive electromagnetic pulse effects and near misses; and smart, able to talk easily to each other using a variety of encrypted signals, so that the enemy could never crack the global communications network.
“It was a highly secret project. It had to be. That was why it was able to obtain huge funding for a long time, even though anyone who looked at it objectively could see why it wouldn’t work. It needed tens of millions of computer instructions, lines of program code that could only be tested when the actual war was declared. It assumed a static world order, with a single well-defined enemy. It bypassed every civilian chain of command. Worst of all, it assumed
that one side or the other could win an all-out nuclear war, and be all set to fight again. No mention of hundreds of millions of casualties, or disabled food and water and sewage and transportation systems, or a totally collapsed economy that couldn’t pay ten cents for a military budget.
“Well, we were lucky. MILSTAR came out from behind its veil of secrecy, little by little. That doomed it. It couldn’t stand the sunlight. Finally, after years and years of staggering along when no one really believed in it but kept it going as a source of jobs and a political pork barrel, the money was cut off and the development ended. MILSTAR never became a working system — on Earth. But something like it was developed, and is still in operation” — Drake indicated the galaxy ahead of the ship — “there.”
Drake had been carried away, in time and space and in a depth of feeling lost to him for aeons. He knew he had spoken for Ana, more than for himself. Those had been her voiced fears, her indignation, her relief at an earthly doom avoided. He also realized, for the first time, that existence in a purely electronic form could admit emotion and passion and longing.
The ship had absorbed the facts of his message, if not its intensity. “So although an S-wave signal system exists in that galaxy,” it said, “the original creators and owners are long vanished. Therefore no moral or practical impediment exists to our taking over its use. We should find it possible to inhibit the encryption system. As soon as we have done that, and our own type of S-wave signals can be sent and received—”
“We can’t do that.”
“I believe that I possess the necessary analytical capabilities, even though you may not be aware of them.”
“That’s not the problem.
The problem is in going there.” Drake again indicated the galaxy ahead of them.
“We are only twenty-one thousand light-years away. We have traveled forty thousand times that distance already, without difficulty. The remaining journey is negligible.”
“No. It’s the place where we can expect trouble. Look at them.” Drake displayed an array of blackened and silent worlds for the ship’s attention. “We can’t say what did this, and for all we know it may still be working. Maybe it’s waiting for something new that it can hit. The weapons ran out of targets. We don’t know that they ran out of anything else. Just because a galaxy is dead of life doesn’t mean it’s safe to go there.”
“Then I request that you propose an alternative.” The ship turned its imaging equipment, swinging slowly from the island of matter ahead to the great ocean of space that surrounded it. “The next nearest galaxy is two and a quarter million light-years away. It showed no evidence of S-wave transmission. Do you suggest that we change to it as our target? I am ready to follow your instructions.”
And that was the devil of it. There was no better alternative. No other galaxy, in a search that stretched halfway across time, had displayed superluminal signals. It was a poor moment to decide that the ship had left the big detection system, laboriously constructed over so many years, prematurely. But it was true. The smart thing would have been to survey every galaxy in the universe for S-wave transmissions, before rushing off to tackle the enigma of the one that lay ahead.
It was Drake’s fault. He should have thought harder and longer before he acted. The price of mindless action was high: they had to return to their detection system, a billion years away, and follow that with another interminable search.
That was the price. But he was not willing to pay it.
Surely something could be done with the facilities that lay ahead of them, so temptingly close? Compared with the other option, twenty thousand light-years was like stepping to the house next door. He knew, with absolute certainty, that a full superluminal capability existed here, in perfect working order. Nothing like it might be found again before the universe itself came to a close.
As the field of view of the ship’s sensors performed its steady turn in space, Drake watched the grand sweep of the galaxies. They had not changed. He had changed. When had he lost his will and daring? When had he become so cautious?
Long ago, without a second thought, he had risked everything. Now, no matter what he did, he would be risking less than everything. Other versions of him surely still existed, even if they happened to be at the far edge of the universe. They did not know that he existed — they would think that he had died fifteen billion years ago, when the ship was swallowed by the caesura. But what of that? They should still be there. Did he have anything to lose, if now he risked the dark menace ahead?
“Aye, but to die, and go we know not where …”
Was that all it was? Simple fear of death?
“Are we still heading for the galaxy?”
“Yes. We have not changed our course.”
“Then forget the alternative. Hold our path. Take us to the nearest world where you are detecting a source of S-wave messages.”
There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.
And how long since he had thought of that? It was time to take a chance, and test the kindness of reality.
Taking a chance on one thing did not mean abandoning caution in everything else.
Drake elected to remain conscious, though not embodied, through the whole slow approach to the galaxy. The ship’s speed had to be subluminal. Meanwhile, the S-wave messages flashed and flickered ahead from spiral arm to spiral arm, as enigmatic as ever. At Drake’s suggestion, the ship’s brain assumed that the messages were deliberately encrypted and tried to decipher them. The effort consumed the bulk of the ship’s computation powers for twelve thousand years. There was no useful result for either type 1 or type 2 messages.
While this was going on, Drake constantly monitored the galaxy ahead. He had no idea of the range of weapons that remained there. At any moment, the ship’s approach might be detected, and an alien force could reach out to consume them. He was ready to power the ship down totally and hope that silence would end the attack, or if that failed to turn the ship around and try to outrun the destruction.
The thirteenth millennium brought the change. It occurred while Drake and the ship were analyzing the comparative freedoms and restrictions of their two mentalities.
“What would you have done, in a similar situation?” The ship was dissatisfied with its own performance.
“Assuming that I were a ship, with your history and your inorganic intelligence? The first thing I would do, after Drake Merlin insisted on being sent as a superluminal signal to this galaxy, is tell myself that embodied humans tend to be impulsive and make decisions too quickly. We evolved that way, because the old human body rarely lasted a century. We were always in a hurry, we had to be. So as a ship I would have spent a long time evaluating my own possible actions. Then I hope I would have asked what could be done at the S-wave detection structure we built and nowhere else. When all those things were done, I would have headed this way.”
“And what would you have done as a human in the same situation?”
“If I could see no possible further use for my existence—”
Drake’s comments on suicide, an idea alien to the ship’s intelligence, were interrupted.
A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-. The ship’s S-wave detector screeched and warbled in overload as a message blared into it.
A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-.
“Is it coming from the galaxy?” Drake had to send his own thought at maximum volume to penetrate the curtain of incoming noise.
A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-.
“I do not know.” The ship’s own signal was barely intelligible. “The source is so powerful. It comes from everywhere. Wait.” The ship de-tuned its receiver, and the volume of signal suddenly dropped to a tolerable level.
WARNING. YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. DO NOT PROCEED FARTHER WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. REPEAT, YOU ARE ENTERING A DANGEROUS AND QUARANTINED AREA. HALT, AND DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT INSTRUCTIONS. WORKING S-WAVE COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS ARE CONTAINED IN CARRIER WAVE. VISUAL AND REAL-TIME INTERACTION FOLLOWS.
“I’m sending our identification and reply.” The ship was already transcribing protocols. “It is safe to do so. That signal
can’t be coming from the galaxy ahead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because there is no encryption. More than that, the signal is in standard form. It must be coming to us from our own form of mentality.”
Drake did not need that last piece of information. The promised visual and real-time information flow was beginning, and pictures were already flowing in. The first frame was very familiar. It was Drake Merlin, staring at something right in front of him. A puzzled voice was saying, “Please transmit that identification sequence again. There appears to have been a transcription error. According to our records, you don’t exist. You haven’t existed for fifteen billion years.”
Drake was not embodied, so he could not send an exultant real-time image of himself. The best that he could do was to provide his own stored and smiling icon, as it was preserved in the ship’s memory.
“What you have received is not a transcription error. We exist, and you have the right ID sequence. We’ve been heading for home all this time. I’m sorry that it took so long.” And then, the only thing that really mattered, the question: “Did you develop the technology needed to restore Ana? Is she there with you?”
While Drake waited for answers, he realized that everything else made sense. A rogue galaxy, devoid of life but sending out S-wave signals and filled with weapons of destruction, was a menace to every intelligence in the universe. A region around that galaxy was needed as a quarantine zone. All the approach routes had to be monitored. Like a dangerous
reef in a peaceful sea, the galaxy must be surrounded by warning bells and lightships. It was a beacon for the whole universe, the best possible place for lost travelers, like Drake and the ship, to arrive at.
And arrive they had. They were on the way home.
In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.
One of those things, now and again, was a little bit of luck.
Chapter 29
Homecoming
With Drake’s return to human space, his problems seemed to be in the past.
The feeling of euphoria did not last. It ended when his question about Ana remained unanswered, and when the image of the other Drake Merlin vanished suddenly from the screen. It was replaced by the face of Tom Lambert. Tom’s features, hair color, and expression varied wildly for a few seconds before they stabilized.
“Unfortunately, Ana has not been resurrected.” Tom’s mouth shrank to half its size, then enlarged again. Drake had seen the effect before. Some strong emotion, fear or joy or rage, was distorting the presentation. “The problem of resurrection will be worked on.
Will be worked on, after so many aeons? Drake wondered what they had been doing all this time. What could possibly be left to do?
But Tom Lambert was continuing. “I’m sorry.” His face writhed with worry, then took on a lopsided smile. “We have not used this particular form of presentation for more than fifteen billion years. We never thought it would be necessary. A return such as yours was never anticipated, although we knew that the theory showed it to be formally possible. Now, of course, we understand exactly what happened. You and your ship remained in this universe, but you passed through a noncausal path in the caesura. Before you reemerged, you traveled seven billion light-years in space and eight billion years forward in time.”
“And then I couldn’t find you for umpteen billion more. But here I am. So what is there to be sorry about?”
“We are sorry that you encountered the warning concerning your approach to the Skrilant Galaxy.”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 33
