We thought about that a moment, and then Daltry added, “So, uh, can I still get your shares in your company? Am I allowed to back up and change my mind about whether this was the greatest thing ever?”
I smiled. “I owe it to you, don't I?”
“That and a blood transfusion.”
Our eyes locked. We'd been business acquaintances for half a decade, and I'd learned more about him in these last days than I'd learned in all those years. If I survived this, I was going to get to know him better. I was going to try to be his friend.
“Let's do it,” he finally whispered.
I nodded. “Karen!” I called. “Daltry's up for air.”
She pushed into the tent seconds later, starting right into a prepared speech. “We have to go in. If it's hostile, sitting here accomplishes nothing. We can't spread whatever is in us, since we're not leaving this forest. And if it's not hostile, then another dive is all that we can do to try to communicate with it. We forge ahead. Try to understand. Try to communicate, if it's intelligent.”
Only then did she notice that Daltry and I were already pulling on our suits.
“Oh,” she finished.
I didn't know if the web posting really helped anything, but I felt relieved that it was done. We had alerted the world. Others could investigate if we failed. Besides: I hated the crawling sensation that something was in me, the no-doubt-illusory sense that I could feel ants under my skull. I had no illusions that a hospital could help. We had to solve this or die trying.
“We're waiting on you,” Daltry said.
She suited up, and then we pulled our helmets on.
* * * *
My vision sputtered, linking to the robot, and then I looked straight into the face of an alien monster.
Or that was my first thought. The graphs and other figures of light were gone from the room Daltry had christened the planetarium. Instead, a single figure stood beside the glowing circle. It had six limbs, three on a side with bilateral symmetry. It stood erect on two of the limbs, and the other four were long and thin. The head was triangular, and crowned with six dark spots that might be eyes, and if so seemed capable of seeing in all directions at once. My first impression was of a strange cross between a primate and a crab.
“Do you think?” Daltry said.
“One of them,” Karen answered. “It must be.”
We walked over to the image, and circled it. No tail. A long protruding ridge that I took to be a spine.
“Small mouth,” Karen observed, her robot bending over to look up from under the head. “I bet it evolved cooking its food, like us. That would be a neat case of convergent evolution: reduction in jaw size and jaw muscle frees space for more brain tissue.”
“But if it has an exoskeleton,” I said, “does that issue even arise? I mean, the muscle might run right through the head.”
“It might not be an exoskeleton,” Karen said.
“And,” Daltry said, “who said the brain is in the head?”
“I wonder how big it was?” Karen said.
Other figures appeared beside the alien. All three of our robots jerked back in surprise.
They were us. Or, rather, images of us: Karen, Daltry, myself. Naked, expressionless, and standing. The head of the alien stood up to Karen's shoulder.
“Well, that answers the size question,” I said.
“I am not that fat,” Daltry said.
“It understood my question,” Karen said. “It understood my question.”
I nodded. “Either that or it was one hell of a coincidence.”
“My god,” she continued, “those things in our head are . . . are they learning English?”
“Or,” I said, “Daltry had a theory earlier: maybe it doesn't understand our language yet, but understands things like confusion, interest, attention.”
“The best interface,” Daltry said, “is one that you don't even know is there. Could we have that interface now? Built into our skulls?”
As if in answer, the dim glow of lights in the walls faded to darkness. Then a white line appeared in the far wall of the room, parallel to the floor. Our three images shrunk and moved away from us quickly, retreating to the wall. They stood now at the far right side of the line, at its very end. A red dot appeared on the line, near the left side, about a quarter of the way across the span.
“If that's a timeline,” Daltry said, “what's the scale?”
The alien began to shrink. Stars appeared, filling the room. Behind the shrinking alien, a glowing blue planet appeared. The figure shrunk and retreated toward the world, diminishing to the proper scale for the planet as it approached the surface.
“It's showing us its world,” Karen said.
“And it's location in space,” I said, turning in place. The stars around us formed brilliant constellations.
The planet began to shrink. In seconds it was gone, only its star visible. Then the stars moved, slipping towards the center of the room. We could only see stars in the dark, and without the timeline as a still reference, it would have been a disorienting, almost nauseating, experience. I noticed then that the red dot on the timeline was moving backwards.
The compressing of the stars accelerated. In seconds, they had collapsed into a roiling nebula that stood alone, and then the nebula imploded to a point. All was dark but the timeline, with the red dot on the far left, and our images on the far right.
Karen's robot turned in place. “Was that a . . . catastrophe of some kind?”
“No,” I said. “No. It's . . . I think it's setting the time scale for us. That was the big bang.”
“In reverse,” Daltry said.
The stars exploded from the center of the room. The tracker on the timeline moved also. We watched gas clouds form and coalesce and set alight. Stars precipitated. Galaxies swirled into being. One galaxy formed and then spun before us, bright silver. A red dot appeared in it. A small image of the alien appeared above the dot. The red began to spread.
“Their age of exploration,” I whispered.
Other colors appeared as small patches in the galaxy. Other figures of organisms, and several that looked like machines, appeared above these colored zones. I wanted to stare at each small figure, examine it, but the events were too fast. The colors met, intermingled.
A rainbow band shot off to other galaxies, waiting near us.
I looked at the time line. The red dot had moved a quarter of the way along the scale. “We're about, what, three or four billion years into the history of the universe? This must be their age of expansion.”
“Given the scale of evolution on Earth,” Karen said, “these must be the first intelligent organisms of the universe, evolved from the first life.”
“Did one of the colors just disappear?” Daltry asked. “A green one?”
As we watched, other colors faded.
“The species icons are disappearing,” Karen said.
“They went extinct?” I asked, incredulous.
“Or . . . they went somewhere else, maybe?” Daltry suggested.
Soon, there was only one color left, stretching across galaxies. The original red of our aliens, their icon still floating in the air above. The limit of their empire began to shrink, diminishing back toward their home world. Then the view began to expand, so that their diminishing empire stayed the same size, but the galaxy grew and surrounded us. In moments their world floated again before us. From its surface, gold points spread out, forming golden trajectories shooting off in every direction. One of the gold threads came straight toward me. The scale shrunk again, and we saw what looked like a ship. A gold ship, sailing through space. It floated before us, a shape like an eagle with folded wings leaning forward. I recognized the front of it.
I glanced at the timeline. A third of the scale was crossed by the red dot. Five billion years into our universe's history.
“It's the probe,” Karen said. “At that scale, it looks like there's another . . . four meters of it in the rock.”
“They . . . they had a golden age. And then it ended,” Daltry said. “But they sent out these probes before they all disappeared.”
“They knew the universe was young,” I said. “They knew that other species would rise and fall, long, long after they had. They wanted to . . . what? See those species? Be part of the future? Take advantage of it somehow?”
“No,” Daltry said. “I think they're gone. I think they just wanted to . . . to talk. To talk to us, even after their passing. This might be a very complex, even an intelligent, monument.”
Other possibilities flitted through my mind, of course. They might want to take over, consume us, replace us, reform us, parasitize us. . . . We still knew so little of their motives. And yet, it seemed somehow hard to believe they were pernicious, if once they'd had a civilization that spanned galaxies and included dozens of other races.
The image of the probe began to change. The front of it opened, flowering. Structures grew out of the new opening, strange golden machines.
The ground began to shake.
“What was that?” Karen asked.
“It wasn't in here,” I said. “Or not only. It was under our feet. Our real feet.”
A deafening crack sounded out, followed by a series of booms of shattering rock. “Pull of your helmets! Now!”
I yanked mine off.
The disorientation lasted only a few seconds, as I adjusted to the bright light of day in the tent. The ground at our feet was splitting. I didn't hesitate. I yanked the cables free of my VR suit, and grabbed the handles to Daltry's chair. “Karen,” I shouted. “Pull up the side of the tent.” The probe was between Daltry and the door, and right there in the doorway the ground was splitting and crumbling.
Karen did it, grabbing the bottom of side of the tent—she had long before cut away the tent's floor—and yanking hard to pull it up and free of its stakes. I drove Daltry's chair through the gap. He seized the wheels hard, and before we were a pace outside the tent, he'd pulled away from me and turned around.
The tent fell over. The probe rose up out of the rock beside it, emerging from the ground, shedding great sheets of broken stone. The top of it opened, folding over. In a minute, it was done: the probe had emerged from the stone, moved forward to just before where the tent had been, and settled there. It sat like a gold eagle leaning forward. Out of the head, where our robots had entered the machine, a thing like an antenna had protruded and flowered open. That would be the room we had called the planetarium; it had, just as I expected, extruded and unfolded, perhaps creating a projector. Along the back of the machine, a strange structure, like a small tower covered in complex geometric shapes, began to rise. It stopped when it was two meters tall.
The image of one of the crablike aliens appeared before us. We stared.
“A virtual ambassador?” I wondered aloud.
“What's that sound?” Daltry asked.
In the distance came the whump, whump of approaching helicopters. Then we heard a shout in the forest not far away. On the rise above us, three young men, looking more like computer geeks than hikers, stood. They jumped up in victory, hands in the air.
“We found it!” one shouted.
The helicopters were quickly approaching. One shot over the rise of the next hill. A green military chopper.
“Oh,” Karen said, “it's all over.”
The helicopter roared overhead, then banked to turn in the valley.
“No,” I told her. “It's only just begun.”
We went and stood beside the image of the alien, like three ambassadors, and waited for the arrival of the rest of the human race.
Copyright © 2011 by Craig DeLancey
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Science Fact: THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING: RADIATION THREATS FROM BEYOND
by Adrian L. Melott
A Flash in the Sky
With no warning and with the suddenness of a camera flash, the sky goes off. There's blue-white light from horizon to horizon. Anyone looking at the sky at the time is blinded, some permanently. As the flash fades away, those on the night side of the Earth realize that the sky is glowing, in a sort of blotchy pale green. Science is mute on the cause because all the satellites that might measure and report what happened from above the atmosphere have gone into safe mode or are burned out, but the best guess is that it might be a gamma-ray burst that happened to be pointed at the Earth.
The glow fades after a few hours, but the sky begins to acquire the kind of tea-colored tint one used to associate with a bad smog attack from automobile exhaust—except it's everywhere. In the next few days, the word goes out that sunlight is dangerous. The levels of UVB have gone up, and exposure can cause serious sunburn within a few minutes—sunblock is almost useless. Working outdoors, even with protection, can lead to cataracts.
Serious problems begin to show up in some plants and wildlife. However, a greater potential threat exists: phytoplankton, which power the food chain in the ocean, are dying rapidly. It appears that a major drop in marine life is in the offing, because nearly all of it depends on the energy captured by the phytoplankton. On land, there is serious mortality to food crops, but some of them seem resistant to the UVB. It will take months or years to know how it will work out.
Famine greatly reduces the world population. After five years or so, things begin to recover. However, many species have vanished permanently.
* * * *
A Universe of Radiation
Geologists tend to like to think of the Earth in isolation. Therefore, they only grudgingly accepted the overwhelming evidence for a catastrophic impact about 65 million years ago, which was a key element in the vanishing of the dinosaurs (carried live on all the cable science channels!) along with many other species. This was one of many mass extinctions—up to 19 can be identified, depending on the criteria we use. Most people would identify the “Big Five” that stand out above the others in intensity. Often they are accompanied by a wholesale change in the ecology, even the kind of sedimentary rocks that are formed. In nearly all cases, the cause is controversial, with no consensus at all. There is a current idea that certain events may reach the “mass” extinction level when the biosphere is under an additional stress, and is hit by some sudden challenge.
I've become interested in this topic. I'm a physicist, and while the roots of my interest came from physics, it's led me into paleontology, and some very fruitful collaborations. One of the things we expect to happen to the Earth is it to be hit by some bursts of radiation from elsewhere. Our review of average rates of events has identified three major external radiation threats: supernovae, Solar proton events, and gamma-ray bursts.
For a long time, people have considered the threat from an “ordinary” supernova. As no doubt most readers know, there are many kinds of supernova. Typically, they constitute a large release of energy from a star collapsing at the end of its fuel-burning lifetime, or sometimes gradually adding mass from a companion until it exceeds the limit of stability. This was portrayed decades ago in a pair of science-fiction novels by Charles Sheffield, Aftermath and Starfire, with surprisingly accurate descriptions of the effects. Sheffield was a physicist who worked on application to space projects.
Even the Sun is a possible danger. The worst Solar flare we know of, in 1859, was called the Carrington Event. It's reasonably well documented. The problem here is that we don't know how much worse they get. A Solar proton event much worse than Carrington could be very bad for life on Earth, particularly humans.
However, my interest in and work on this topic began with gamma-ray bursts. In 2003, I changed fields and started this investigation. The story of how that happened will frame my description of the threat.
* * * *
In the Beginning
It began calmly enough, when a prospective physics faculty member was a candidate at KU. One of the things we do is have them give a talk about their research. He explained his research on the mechan
isms of gamma-ray bursts, which are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe. I asked him, “So what would happen if one of these goes off in our Galaxy?” Laconically, he said “It's not good,” which brought a few laughs. So, he joined our faculty, and the next year we decided to have a look at the effects. It turned out that some work had already been done on this possibility, but there was room for a lot more.
I should explain that up to this point nearly all my work had been in cosmology, investigating the formation of structure on the largest scales where clumping is seen. When I got involved in the radiation burst threat, it proved so interesting that it completely changed my research. I haven't looked back.
My opening scenario at the beginning of this article was based on the effects of a dangerously-near gamma-ray burst.
* * * *
A First Look at Gamma-Ray Bursts
In the 1960's, most nuclear-capable nations signed a treaty not to test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere or in space. Naturally a way was needed to monitor compliance. The US launched the Vela series of satellites, which looked for bursts of X-rays and gamma-rays, which are associated with nuclear weapons. The surprise was in detecting such bursts within a few months of being operational; the consternation in the intelligence community was that there was no other evidence of explosions. No radiation in the atmosphere, no rumors, no seismic wave—nothing. Later, directional capability was added, and people were relieved to learn that the bursts were coming from the sky.[1]
The sources remained a mystery for a quarter-century. It was learned that one or so per day can be detected, and that they originate pretty much uniformly all over the sky. This means they are either local or cosmic. We see nearby, bright stars all around us. The distribution of faint, dim stars include the Milky Way, which is the disk of our Galaxy seen edge-on. But if we survey very distant galaxies, they are once again all around us. The gamma-ray burst distribution tells us they are not galaxy-wide, but could be either near us or at cosmological distances.
They are quite powerful. Their power enabled them to be mistaken for nuclear weapons on the ground! That's why most people assumed they were within a few light-years. In this case, the minority turned out to be right. In the late ‘90s a series of source identifications connected them with very distant galaxies and the large energies mentioned earlier. During the few seconds of the burst they radiate to us about 1045 Joules, more gamma-ray energy than the entire rest of the Universe.Later, it was deduced that they are beamed, with the energy going out to maybe .01 of the solid angle around them. So you can knock off two zeros from the energy, but there are one hundred going off for every one you see.
Analog SFF, March 2012 Page 5
