The Asteroid

by M R Cates

  “Sandra, it is ... beyond words!” The student wasn't aware she was being heard by all on the plane until that moment, when the wordless noises of agreement came back to her.

  The orange advance plume gradually weakened, and the craft itself continued to slow. Jason's voice came in again and asked Sandra, “How does the ... the doughnut get its lift, Sandra? It's not in a free fall trajectory, really.”

  “Damned if I know, Jason,” was her answer. “But if they can make an advance vacuum that propagates at thousands of kilometers per hour, they can hold their doughnut up. Not only can we bet on it, we're seeing it.”

  “But it can't be magic,” Jason insisted.

  “No,” she agreed. “Let's imagine, however, that they can reduce pressure above the doughnut, like they made that vacuum. Then the pressure below, just like a wing's lift, but from a different process, would hold them up. Listen did you find some views through the advance plume?”

  “I think we got something that'll work, Sandra,” Jason said. “It's going to take me a little while.”

  Sandra said, “If you can get something similar in the next few minutes, we might be able to see if that lift effect I mentioned is what they're doing.”

  “Will see what I can do,” Jason agreed. He did, however, sound a little haggard. Things were moving pretty fast.

  Around the world, thousands of scientists and engineers had observed the approach of the alien craft. News agencies of every stripe had switched to uninterrupted reporting. Even the most sophisticated of broadcast anchors were openly excited. People in all walks of life, all over the world, had stopped what they had been doing, and were watching and waiting. As the clock pushed on toward 4:00 in Hawaii, the excitement increased palpably. Sandra grew quieter and more intent. At 3:45, Françoise announced, “Sandra, I have it in the scope. It is truly amazing. Here is the ... the image.”

  The C-5 was on the south radius of the circling path, intentionally positioned near the line of approach of the object. The two telescopes on the C-5, operated by technicians, were already turned to the proper direction. Sandra looked at the image sent to her. Then she glanced out her window. There was bright blue sky all around, only wisps of clouds having crossed the line of Hawaiian islands to the western sides. Looking back at the screen, the image showed the brown toroid, shimmering a little in the view. Its surface still appeared relatively cool.

  Sandra asked, “How fast now, Françoise?”

  “Only 1000 kilometers per hour.”

  “We see it, Dr. Hughes,” said the technician controlling the on-board scopes. He sent both images, split screen, to her second monitor. The C-5 was moving gradually east and north and would be due east of the landing site at 4:00. At 50,000 feet they were likely to see the object pass at near their same altitude. It was even possible the 50 mile limit might be violated as it passed. The talking subsided to a minimum. Everyone was busy on the aircraft. At 3:52 Sandra, looking out her window as far to the left as possible, saw the object for the first time with the unaided eye. The reality of it hit the astronomer like a ton of bricks. And only a few seconds before the energy field did.

  There was sudden shuddering throughout the C-5. The plane lurched upward, then downward, as if hitting a shock of turbulence. There were several startled cries, including one from Sandra Hughes. The air around them was perfectly clear one instant, then shimmering as if filled with tiny reflecting mirror shards the next. Sandra said to Françoise, “We're ... shaking here! Some kind of energy disturbance. Has to be ... the ... our alien visitors. The craft is passing over the ... the 50-mile radius they described. We may be a ... little too close to them on the east. Air is like billions of sparkles! A tech here is getting some digital photos.”

  There was no response from Françoise. “Did you get that?” Sandra repeated. Still nothing. The image being sent by satellite from the Keck control room was blank on her screen. Again the C-5 lurched, a worse drop this time, then sudden lift. Sandra felt queasiness build in her stomach. Oddly, she was less afraid than troubled by loss of contact. The third shuddering was the worst, rippling through the sturdy craft, causing the wings to sway out of phase with each other, flopping up and down precariously. How far could they bend without breaking? The plane seemed to slip sideways, left wing tilting up at least 60 degrees above horizontal, dropping for hundreds of feet, still in the midst of flashing sparkles of light, then lurching back up, again hundreds of feet. The C-5's airspeed had been kept just under 400 miles per hour. Now it almost seemed that they'd stopped dead still. The shuddering passed and the sparkles thinned out, then the fourth ripple went through, weaker but still powerful, with more surges of sparkles. It was 3:55 One final shudder grabbed them, then let go. Sandra took a breath, ignored her stomach and looked out the window, this time down. Françoise's telescope image came back into view, but poorly. Their own images, however, were magnificent.

  Below them now, the craft seemed to be creeping toward the ocean below. It shimmered in the sky, not in focus, as if the air between them and it were full of thermal distortions. Around the shimmering shape, in a kind of halo, was a repetition of that sparkle pattern they'd experienced. At the window behind her a technician was taking digital video images. Sandra was sure she could see flashes of reddish light near the inner diameter of the craft, coming and going. But the shimmers were so blurring it was hard to distinguish any detail. Relying fully on the telescope image, inadequate as it was, Sandra watched the descent. At 3:57 by the C-5's clock the craft came to a halt hovering a few hundred yards above a slightly choppy Pacific Ocean. Then that orange plume appeared again, moving downward. Like the Master on the Sea of Galilee, the soft colored cloud appeared to push against the waves, forcing them apart. A circular, flat zone in the water formed, discernible – barely – through the orange glow. Around its perimeter, the sea churned and roiled, like a restrained wild animal. Into the orange glow the craft settled. As it touched the water the clock touched 3:57:24. Close, but a bit early! Sandra thought, and shook her head in amazement.

  No sooner had the craft reached sea level than the orange plume dimmed then vanished. The brown doughnut lay on its side, floating, with about 25 percent of its mass above water. The inner diameter – of so much fascination to Sandra – was completely under water. Up and down it bobbed, rising and dropping with the significant swells that are common in that area of the Pacific.

  Sandra spoke into her microphone. “Françoise, can you hear me okay?”

  “Yes, Sandra. It is floating! It is ... “

  “Unbelievable,” Sandra finished for her. “Yes. Listen, what time did it touch down?”

  Françoise took a second to verify. It was 4:00 exactly, Sandra. And to the ... the very second. Amazing, wasn't it?”

  Sandra took in a deep breath. “Yes, I'd say so. Guess what?” She had made sure everyone in the C-5 could also hear. “Here in the plane we just got two minutes and 36 seconds younger.”

  Chapter 33

  It took forty minutes, after observing the floating craft for a while, to land in Honolulu, and another forty-five to get back to Waimea. Sandra exited the helicopter, seeing Vigola and Carstairs waiting for her. Her watch read 5:40. Clocks in Waimea would be reading 5:42. The first likely time for a Fragment Five transmission would be around 7:15. With the chopper's rotor cranking down, the noise level dropped enough that she could brief the two as they walked toward Sandra's car. The astronomer, however, only gave a bare outline of the events. Sandra felt – even more than an hour after the event – still stunned, with some nagging remains of her stomach distress.

  The plans were to have Madeleine Vigola and Joseph Carstairs at the Keck control room that evening, so the three traveled the short distance there in a two-car caravan. Inside, Sandra met an excited and exhausted Jason and Françoise. Instinctively, she hugged them both. Vigola, in a strangely expansive mood herself, shook hands with Jason and Françoise. Carstairs, maybe feeling he now had to, followed suit, looking slightly unco
mfortable in the process. And, on the way over, the Chief of Staff had ordered a number of pizzas for the Keck teams, including the standby group, herself and Carstairs. The pizzas arrived only a few minutes after Sandra did, giving rise to a time of food and relaxation. It was a break they all needed.

  As they ate and visited quietly, with conversation intentionally away from Asteroid 1744 for a while, Carl Von Drath arrived, having been given a ride by Reginald Wyler. Wyler had other business to attend to and left the group soon thereafter.

  Carl, like most people on earth, had been watching television coverage of the alien landing. Several telescopes around the world, and a couple in orbit – not a part of Sandra's working consortium – had shared their images with various news organizations (probably for large fees, of course). Most of the trajectory of the craft had therefore been tracked and made public. Certain higher budget broadcasters, like CNN, displayed elaborate maps showing the earth with a curved line tracing out the approach. A parade of retired Air Force generals, NASA scientists, and other designated experts speculated to the excited viewing public about the meaning of the new events. Since few facts were available, rumors were often treated essentially as facts. Among the wide array of speculations were some, however, that came quite close to the truth. Yet, since the truth was known by so few, the more interesting or frightening the speculation, generally the more attention it got. No one outside the handful who were aware of the alien communications was able to accurately predict where the strange stone craft would actually touch down, but a number of observers guessed – based primarily on the trajectory – that the Pacific off of Hawaii would be a reasonable site. A few suggested that the aliens might be intent on crashing their stone into the telescope on Mauna Kea that had alerted mankind to their presence. Others around the world were openly concerned, in fact, that the craft was not a craft at all, but a kind of missile intent on striking something on the surface. As the final moments approached it became clear that enigmatic object was not really going to crash and that it would be coming down in the ocean in an area that was very remote. Only the telescopes and similar instrumentation on or near Hawaii could follow that last phase, and the U.S. authorities had done an excellent job of controlling the observing assets available on the group of islands. And since the final approach and landing site were quite some distance offshore, no amateurs in Honolulu, along the Kona coast, or other observers anywhere on Hawaii could get any kind of view of the last few minutes of the craft's path to the water. Various announcers intimated that the U.S. military had been watching the final phase of the descent but no confirmation was forthcoming from any of the contacted American authorities.

  Carl, interestingly enough, was the only person in the group sitting around the conference table eating pizza that had actually followed the public news reports. His information turned out to be easily as interesting as that from any of the others. One of his first comments was, “If our alien visitors thought they would make their approach in any kind of secrecy they have not succeeded in the least.”

  Madeleine Vigola asked, “Dr. Von Drath, did you hear any evidence that the alien communications were known about outside official circles?”

  The old astrophysicist seemed to go back through his recent memory. “I don't think, Ms Vigola, that any of that information has leaked. However, several comments were made about the aliens apparently wanting more direct contact with human beings.”

  She nodded and followed up with, “These were speculations, however, in your opinion?”

  “Speculations, yes, but from reasonable people who have apparently been doing a lot of research into the available information about the asteroid and its companions.”

  Sandra, finishing a bite, said, “The world full of curious people, with the network of communications we have, is not going to be surprised by much of anything, and is going to imagine almost everything.”

  Joseph Carstairs said, “Will the aliens be aware of this part of our human nature, Dr. Hughes?”

  “Probably,” she nodded. “They have been studying us in amazing detail, given their knowledge of our languages and our system of keeping time, and I'm sure, many other details.”

  Vigola wondered, “What makes you speak of time, Dr. Hughes?”

  “You remember that the messages said they'd land at 4:00 this afternoon, Madeleine, and they managed to do so, to the second.”

  “I'm confused about that,” Carstairs said. “In our contacts with the people here (he indicated Françoise and Jason) the time was four o'clock exactly. But the C-5 time was a little earlier.”

  Françoise looked over knowingly toward Sandra, but said nothing. Sandra said, “We had synched our watches and clocks carefully to the international standard signal – on the C-5 and here in the control room. Yet the time on my watch and the clock aboard the C-5 read two minutes and thirty-six seconds earlier.”

  Vigola asked, “Do you have an explanation, Dr. Hughes?”

  “No explanation,” Sandra said, “but a guess. Maybe you can see what you think of this, Carl.” She looked over at her friend, directly opposite her at the table.

  Carl looked up warmly – warmly, that is, if you could read his expression. “I'm anxious to hear your guess, Sandra.”

  “Okay. As the craft approached, they generated some kind of effect that propagated a vacuum, or near vacuum, in front of the craft, protecting it from overheating, I suspect.”

  Carstairs nodded, “We noted that part of the report, doctor. That is rather ... unbelievable.”

  “It is indeed,” Sandra nodded. “To do something like that requires shoving aside a lot of air molecules very rapidly. The mechanical motion of the molecules – the net motion away from each other to make a vacuum – would have to be many kilometers per second. This is a block of air around 60 meters in diameter – a lot of gas. The advance plume we saw was only some tens of meters in front of the craft; consequently, it would have had to accelerate these air molecules – without many collisions, that would have shown themselves by heating of the air and its resultant self-emission spectrum – to rather high speeds rather quickly. But if they could somehow make the air molecules temporarily disappear, then ...”

  “Disappear?” Carstairs interrupted. “Are you saying ...”

  “I'm saying,” she continued, “that if the molecules were to convert, in the quantum mechanical sense and only for a brief time into a part of the intrinsic energy of the space-time continuum – the so-called energy of space – there would be no possible mechanical collision with the moving craft.”

  Madeleine Vigola was fascinated by the suggestion. “Is it your opinion, Dr. Hughes, that such a thing occurred?”

  Sandra glanced at the Chief of Staff, holding a piece of pizza and looking far less formidable than she had earlier. “Madeleine, please feel free to call me Sandra. You, too, Joe. We're all on the same team, right? As for what happened, all I know is that there was some distortion of space-time. Our clocks in the C-5 didn't track, and we were quite close – the closest humans at any rate – to the trajectory of the craft. Some theories of matter predict behavior not too different from what we saw. If we saw what we saw?” She raised her eyebrows at the assembled, then took another bite of pizza. “This is great stuff, Madeleine. Chicago style, my favorite.”

  “A Texas girl,” Carl said, “who likes Chicago style pizza?”

  “What's the world coming to, anyway?” Sandra said.

  Françoise didn't quite get the significance but smiled. The atmosphere, charged as it was, was lighter than it had been in days.

  Madeleine Vigola raised her can of diet soda. “Yes, Sandra, the same team. This has been a ... momentous day. A toast to a very fine group of professionals. Thank you so much.”

  They all raised their cans. Françoise said, “A notre santé!”

  “I'll drink to that,” Sandra nodded, and did so.

  Vigola turned to Carl. “Is this area of science familiar to you, doctor?”

&n
bsp; Carl said, after a brief pause, “Only in general terms. But the line of thought Sandra outlined has been reached only by calculations. There are no measurements that have confirmed or disproved these ideas.”

  Sandra added, “Often measurements lead to calculations, Madeleine, that help explain the results in general terms. Those are the theories we speak of. Occasionally – like for Einstein's Theory of Relativity – there have been calculations that give hints at needed experiments. In the case of Relativity, measurements were devised to check some of his predictions. So far, the guy's ideas have held up rather well.” She glanced at Carl and raised an eyebrow. “Sometimes the staid old Teutons come up with a useful thing or two.”

  Carl gave her his smile that was hard to identify as one, and said, “But the time shift she mentioned is extremely important, I think. In a sense, it has been a kind of measurement that was observed.”

  “Exactly,” Sandra said. “Unfortunately, we don't know all the measurement parameters involved. Maybe I can ask the aliens.”

  A sudden seriousness swept through the room. There was silence for a full ten seconds.

  Jason, who had been quietly observing, and not confident about his own ideas, ventured out with, “Sandra, is ... well, if the aliens are doing as you suggested, does that somehow explain their propulsion? The plasma plumes I mean.”

  Sandra looked across at him. “Damn, that's a good thought, Jason. It might, indeed. We've been guessing they converted material from the asteroid into a plasma by some means or another. It could be some aspect of the same process.”

  “But,” Françoise said, “isn't heating material to a plasma different, you see, from causing molecules to ... to vanish into space?”

  Sandra nodded at her. “Yes, maybe an altogether different process. But, if there is any way to extract the intrinsic energy of space-time, that energy – presumably – could be used to heat material. Imagine causing some of the substance of the asteroid to convert to an excited version of itself. By excited I mean so much additional kinetic energy that the electrons shake off and turn it into a plasma. That seems to be what they've done. And have set this material in motion along their doughnuts' central axes.”