Encounter With Tiber

by Buzz Aldrin

  The man who rose asked, “It looks like two different species, or maybe three, getting into that rocket ship. Are you sure they are all native to Tiber?”

  “It would not be impossible for one starfaring race to already be acquainted with another,” Auricchio pointed out. “But it’s really too early to tell. For all we know, Tiber was settled from elsewhere and both species are colonists; or they may be one species—after all, an alien visitor would hardly know that a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard were the same species. Perhaps these are just different races of Tiberians. Next question?”

  The Times reporter raised his voice and half-shouted, “What about the IAU’s declaration yesterday that—”

  “The IAU may go to the devil, and undoubtedly they have the address,” Auricchio said. “I found it, I named it. No gaggle of fuzzy-minded internationalists is going to call my discovery after some stone idol or swaggering dictator. Now let’s have an interesting question.”

  It went on like that, and when it became clear there wouldn’t be much more real news, they turned the television off and got on with the busy routine of the station. Every so often, though, Chris and François, working together on a set of precise gravimetric measurements, would catch each other’s eye, and one or the other would mutter, “If we’d just named it Marianne when we had the chance. …”

  “Or Nero or Caligula,” Peter would add. “To provide a more balanced view of Rome, you know.”

  The names given by Auricchio stuck; they were easy to remember and pronounce, some version of the names already existed in most of the world’s major languages, and—as Americans and Europeans usually said when they were polled about it—“they just sounded more like names for planets.”

  The IAU put out many press releases reminding people that the new names were unofficial; only the New York Times continued the IAU’s temporary nomenclature of calling the new worlds Alpha Centauri A-I, Alpha Centauri A-I-l, Alpha Centauri B-I, Alpha Centauri B-I-l, Alpha Centauri B-I-2, and Alpha Centauri B-I-3; everyone else said Juno, Tiber, Minerva, Alba Longa, Hercules, and Caesar, just as Auricchio had, and the aliens immediately were dubbed the “Tiberians.”

  Auricchio did not entirely have things his own way, however. About a year later, a diligent Japanese astronomer at Tsukuba demonstrated that there weren’t any pictures from the Hubble Telescope that had little white dots in the places where Auricchio had shown them. Further investigation showed that, stymied by the limits of precision that even the powerful Hubble had to contend with, Auricchio had altered the pictures, adding the images, in order to get “Caesar” into his list of discoveries. He lost his university job, and from then on was only heard of on “where are they now?” programs on television. The single time one of those programs came on in our house, a few years later, my father said a couple of things that he’d have washed my mouth out with soap for, and turned the set off. But even he still called the new worlds by Auricchio’s names. They were just too convenient not to, and besides, everyone else did.

  The message kept coming for seven more months before shutting off for good. During that time it was recorded and rerecorded many times, but it was always the same 16,384 frames—a number which, it was quickly realized, was equal to 214, or 4 X 84—perhaps the equivalent of our 50,000. Teams of experts confirmed Dad’s speculation about the location in terms of pulsars, and the pictures of the aliens themselves were gone over extensively as well. Slowly, though there were still many mysteries, a consensus as to the meaning of the message began to form.

  One way or another it seemed to be addressed to Tiberian colonies. A change of symbol on Alba Longa (the moon orbiting Alpha Centauri B) in the animation, apparently denoted the point in the orbit at which the message had been sent. This turned out to be the time when the four most radio-noisy objects in the Alpha Centauri System—the two stars and the two gas giants—were at maximum separation from Alba Longa (if you looked from the viewpoint of the Earth). A symbol at the bottom of the screen appeared to be a counter that increased from 112 to 113 (assuming we were reading their numbers correctly) when the symbol popped up; the same counter was at zero when the animation depicted the launching of the mystery boxes. Thus it seemed to most people to say that the broadcast had been made 112 times since the launching of the boxes to the colonies, and that this was the 113th broadcast.

  The periods of maximum separation occurred irregularly, and some were better than others from a standpoint of radio broadcasting, but the biggest factor in when they occurred was the eighty-year elliptical orbit of A around B. The second biggest factor was the highly elliptical two-and-a-half-year orbit of Alba Longa around Minerva; times of maximum separation could be anywhere from seventy-two to ninety-one years apart when that was factored in, but on the average they would be just over eighty years. Thus if this broadcast was the 113th from that transmitter, it must be about 112 times eighty years since the first broadcast. That put the inception somewhere around 7000 B.C. As more data became available a more exact date would be possible, but “nine thousand years ago” worked pretty well. Apparently the events depicted in the message had been a century or two before the date of the message.

  They had come here, in more than one ship, probably at more than one time, and then for some unaccountable reason, instead of returning home they had gone to the South Pole of the Moon, and to Crater Korolev on Mars. The arrow pointing to Mars clearly designated 73 degrees north latitude; the short flash of a picture that followed it showed a large crater. The only large crater on that line of latitude was Korolev, though it appeared from their picture that Korolev had been less ice-filled at the time of the Tiberian visit than it was now—another mystery as to what had happened on Mars in the intervening years.

  But the mysterious box that had been inexplicable to Chris and the other astronauts on the ISS had become the greatest focus of attention. The first clue as to what it was about had been the strange picture at the lower left, which showed a coil of ten black and ten white dots in a tight spiral, surrounded by ten circles, with an arrow indicating one of them. It had taken only a few days for someone to think of the idea that this might denote an atom; the most common form of the neon atom has a nucleus of ten neutrons and ten protons and is surrounded by shells containing ten electrons. The particular spot marked was one of the outer electrons, and again it did not take long to realize this was the way of specifying a wavelength of light. Electron orbits are quantized, meaning they can only occur at particular energy levels and no others; when an electron is kicked into a higher orbit than its “ground” state, it will eventually return to that ground state by giving up the exact difference in energies between the two orbits; this will be the same for every electron in the same orbit around the same type of nucleus in the universe. And because the energy of the photon it gives off to get rid of the energy is directly proportional to its frequency, to specify a given electron transition within the electron shells of a given atom is to exactly specify the kind of light to be produced (and incidentally to give directions on how to make it).

  The arrows clearly specified that the viewer was supposed to produce light of that wavelength, pulsed according to another set of directions where the unit of time seemed to be based on how long it took 4096 wavelengths of that light to go by a fixed point in a vacuum. That light should be directed onto the square plug in the box; light at one 128 different frequencies, specified by more pictures of atoms, would emerge from the round plug, stuttered so as to form streams of base-eight numbers. (In effect, it was like having a television getting 128 channels at once; we would just have to pick which channel we wanted to “watch” and which to “tape” first.) The first tiny fraction of that would be a copy of this message (or so everyone interpreted it to say), apparently for calibration; then there would be sixteen days of data coming through apparently at ten gigabaud rates on all the channels.

  This was confirmed by what appeared to be a sign showing that there would be ten million times as much info
rmation in the message that came out of the box as there would be in the message we had received by radio. Now that we had deciphered enough of the message to know the intended play speed, we knew the message was supposed to be seven minutes and forty seconds long; ergo, the information contained in that box was the equivalent of a movie one hundred forty-six thousand twelve years long—or of perhaps half a million average-length books, the equivalent of a small college library.

  So what the box appeared to be was the record—poems, paintings, music, literature, science, engineering, jokes, whatever—of a civilization about 200 years in advance of our own, assuming that their technological progress had taken a roughly equivalent path. Within days of the message being decoded, nearly everyone, all at once, had taken to calling it the Encyclopedia; no one knew where that term had come from.

  Probably the message hadn’t been addressed to us, but intended to tell Tiberian colonies at the lunar south pole and at Crater Korolev on Mars where to find the box with all the information. Why they hadn’t sent one to Phobos, even though their little map seemed to say they had gone there, was another puzzle—I remember Dad, Peter Denisov, and Aunt Lori arguing about that one out on the back porch when I was trying to sleep. Had the Tiberians lost or abandoned their Phobos colony? Had it been just a temporary stop on the way to Mars? To annoy the other two, Peter sometimes maintained that the colony on Phobos had been bad, and that was why they didn’t get any Encyclopedia.

  The name “Encyclopedia” for the box that contained so much Tiberian information had stuck early and thoroughly. So had the most fundamental idea of all on the subject—that the human race ought to go and get the Encyclopedia, returning to the moon after more than thirty years since Apollo 17.

  The question was, which part of the human race, and how? At first, since the Chinese had the only actual plan to get to the Moon, they had simply declared that they would accelerate their efforts, go get the Encyclopedia, and “share” with other nations “according to their needs.” This had led to an emergency Four Power Space Conference, comprised of the U.S., Russia, Japan, and France (hastily rejoined by ESA, because the other nations of Europe had abruptly realized they might be left out entirely). With a combination of proven Russian and European technology, plus American and Japanese manufacturing capability and materials, it should be possible to “beat the Chinese from a standing start,” as the president of the United States put it.

  This was growing more urgent, because the Cold Peace was threatening to get hot at any moment. American vessels were shadowed by Chinese submarines everywhere from Pusan to Haiphong, Russian forces were moving up to the line for “border incidents” every few weeks, and the Chinese were issuing not-very-veiled threats to begin shooting down communications satellites if direct satellite broadcasts into China did not cease. Since many of those satellites were now privately operated by companies in flag-of-convenience countries, and most of the offensive broadcasts were originating with private Chinese émigré groups, even if they had wanted to, the four powers could not have shut them down. Meanwhile the Chinese burned more coal per capita every year, and as dark clouds of soot rolled across Japan, Korea, Formosa, and the Philippines, the Pacific Rim nations, using Japanese money and Korean military expertise, began to rapidly rearm. Confronted with the real possibility of nuclear missile attack for the first time in a generation, Russia and the United States began to seriously plan for and build missile defenses for the first time in either of their histories; China’s ICBMs were still few in number, and there was still the possibility that being able to shoot some of them down might make a difference.

  In the context of such a competition, the possibility of the Chinese getting the Encyclopedia, and with it a two-hundred-year leap in technology, was completely unacceptable. The Speaker of the House put it succinctly: “We can’t let them have the only library card in the solar system.”

  Yet a race for the Encyclopedia was extremely risky for both sides. First there was the possibility of losing; then there was the prospect that one side or other, in its haste, might take too many risks and destroy the Encyclopedia; finally and worst was the prospect of knowledge from the Encyclopedia being deployed hastily and without forethought—“What if you’d given Napoleon the atom bomb? What if the Civil War had been fought with airplanes dropping poison gas on cities?” It seemed to many of the decision-makers involved that not only did the Encyclopedia need to be secured for everyone, it also needed to be used thoughtfully, with some idea about what we were and weren’t ready to tackle at this point in our history.

  It was the Third World nations that truly brought China to the conference table, however. Just as in the previous Cold War, the militarily and economically weaker power had to look for cheap ways to harass the enemy, and financing revolutionary movements around the world, particularly in resource-rich areas, had been the obvious way. But the Third World leadership had learned from the squabbles over the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Moon Treaty that if they left the big nations that could get the resources to their own devices, the likely rule for the exploitation of distant resources was “finders keepers”—a process in which the rich nations could get richer while the poor nations lost markets for raw materials. As poor nations, they could hardly approve of that.

  The Four Power Plan was not perfect from the Third World standpoint, but it did require that the contents of the Encyclopedia be downloaded into a readily accessible form and made available to everyone. The Chinese plan—that China would decide what everyone else needed to know—was much more threatening. And because Chinese operations in the Third World required great numbers of sympathetic governments there, when a dozen usually pro-Chinese leaders began to complain about the Chinese position, China was forced to sit up and take notice.

  Thus, reluctantly, and jealous of its rights, a Chinese delegation joined the Four Power planning session, and within a year a plan had been worked out for a mission to the lunar south pole to retrieve the Encyclopedia. The most important thing to everyone involved seemed to be to get access to the Encyclopedia. To set up a task force to go to the Moon and download it onto other media there, without moving it, was obviously time-consuming and judged to be impractical. Thus the Encyclopedia would have to be found and flown back to Earth.

  The plan, therefore, was built around the simple question, “How can we get the Encyclopedia from wherever it is around the lunar pole back to the Earth’s surface, where our experts can study it?” First robot explorers would go, to search the area and find the place where the Encyclopedia lay. When the robots found the Encyclopedia, they would plant a radio transponder to mark out a landing site within a short distance. Then an unmanned lunar lander—equipped to haul a heavy cargo, because the description of the Encyclopedia had not specified a mass and for all anyone knew it might be made out of lead, gold, or depleted uranium—would land near it. A team of four would fly in in a second lander, with spare fuel, and set down nearby; the team would then load the Encyclopedia into the first lander and refuel it to capacity. Two of the team would then fly the full lander directly back to Earth for a splashdown landing like the first Moon missions; the other two would return in their lander, or continue their stayover, depending on what seemed to be the most effective use of them.

  The plan lasted only until the first robots got to the south pole and found not an Encyclopedia but a complete Tiberian base, including one of their spacecraft parked in a deep crater, a vast bank of solar collectors high up on the inside of a crater wall, clear evidence of habitations for many Tiberians, and something that looked too much like a graveyard—neat rows of stone cairns, roughly of human body length—to be anything else. Within days almost everyone in the world had seen the pictures, and two equal and opposite effects had happened.

  On the one hand, “Tiber Base” as it had been dubbed, was seen as a fascinating place that everyone wanted to know more about. On the other hand, it enormously complicated the search for the Encyclopedia, for there
were two possibilities: either the Tiberians had moved the Encyclopedia into some part of Tiber Base, in which case human explorers would have to go there and open the doors and peer into the storage spaces, or else the Encyclopedia had arrived after Tiber Base was dead or abandoned and might have come down at a considerable distance. The public, never particularly logical in their approach to the world, concluded that since Tiber Base was the best evidence so far that the Tiberian message had told the truth, then people would need to go to Tiber Base, and in at least the democratic nations of Russia, the United States, Japan, and France, that swung a great deal of weight.

  Thus the plan was hastily rewritten and rescheduled. An unmanned lander, equipped to bring a crew back, would go to Tiber Base first. Then a first manned mission would land at Tiber Base to look for the Encyclopedia; meanwhile, the robots would continue to look for it everywhere else around the base. The first mission would also do some simple construction to create a better base for the second expedition, which would arrive after them as the first “stay over” mission (i.e., only two of them would return; two others would remain to work with the third mission when it arrived). The second expedition, among other things, would set up a power plant to process the ice in the deep craters at the south pole (where sunlight has never reached since the craters were formed).

  The Moon, where water never flowed and there is no air for any practical purpose, might seem to be a strange place to find ice, but the lunar south pole was a special case. Most of the Moon undergoes a two-week-long day followed by a two-week-long night, for as the Moon swings around the Earth, always facing the Earth, it rotates with respect to the Sun. (Imagine that you are the Sun, a tree at a distance is the Earth, and a friend of yours is the Moon. If he walks around the tree, keeping his face to the tree the whole time, then when he is nearest you, his back is toward you; when he is farthest away, his face is toward you. In the same way, every point on the Moon’s equator must eventually face the Sun.)