Emprise (8 page)

“And you are comfortable with that?”

“Of course not. But neither is it something that I can change. What powers of review once resided with the House of Lords have fallen to me, and modest powers they are. I dare not give orders that might be refused. I do not believe that you and your party meant any threat to me. That was the product of a certain understandable oversensitivity. Nor do I believe your claim to have contacted aliens. As you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

“We were prepared to offer it, and still are.”

“Then do—now, to me. You have one hour to convince me. If you do, then there are some things I may be able to do for you. If not—”

“How can I—if your mind is no more open than Smythe-White and the others.” William smiled. “But you’re in luck, because as it happens, I should like it very much if you were right. Please, begin.”

One hour stretched into three, and then into dinner, served to them on silver trolleys by mute house servants. The session reminded Aikens of nothing so much as oral exams—except that for the first time in many years, it was Aikens who bore the burden of answering the jury’s interrogatives.

The King questioned Aikens closely and knowledgeably. What steps had been taken to rule out the various sorts of interference which cropped up during such measures? Mightn’t the signal be some natural phenomenon creatively interpreted, much as when the first pulsar was tabbed “LGM” for “little green men”? What about Cepheid variables or natural masers or flare stars? How did he explain the fact that conscious searches conducted through the 1990’s in the Netherlands, U.S.S.R., and U.S.A. turned up no evidence of life elsewhere?

Backtracking into space physics, electromagnetic theory, and biology, Aikens argued his case. The discovery of the Vegan halo in 1983 and the Beta Pictoris disk a year later proved at last that other solar systems existed, nay, were commonplace. Work in American laboratories had recreated elementary chemical evolution, through to the creation of the first simple self-replicating organismoids.

With the general argument established to King William’s satisfaction, the questioning turned to the specific case. Here the monarch was less easily persuaded.

“The original discoverer disappears. You did not collect the data yourself. The man who did does so in secret, so he says, and there are, of course, no witnesses. The signal is reportedly strong, yet you cannot tell me which of a dozen stars in that part of the sky is responsible. The message proves to be encrypted in English, which you can explain only by assuming they have received our own inadvertent signals.”

“They say they did,” Aikens pointed out.

“The translators say they say they did,” King William corrected. “Dr. Aikens, there is no good reason why a first contact should have to conform to the way we think it ought to happen. But—”

“Would you believe it if you heard it yourself, from your own equipment with your own technicians supervising? Would that satisfy you that the message was only received here, not created here? Or would you think we had found some way of extending our fraud into deep space?”

“How can that be done?”

“Take us to any satellite earth station with low-noise receiving equipment for the 1 to 10 gigahertz range. There were dozens of them, not just observatories. Surely one must be intact.”

“There is an INTELSAT ground station at Burton-upon-Trent, but whether it can do what you ask I can’t say. Write down your needs and I will find out.”

“I want all of us there—the whole team. Bring as many guards as you like, but the whole team has a right to be there.”

“I’m glad you are feeling better enough to be presumptuous,” King William said. “I’ll see what can be arranged. But you must realize that I can make no promises even if this test is conducted, that if you fail—”

“Then we’ll be executed,” Aikens said soberly. “And fifty or a hundred or five hundred years from now, when the Cassiopeians make good on their promises, everybody will know that we were right. But that will be too late, for us and for you, because all the options will be gone.”

“You
are
feeling better,” King William said approvingly. “Now, is there anything else?”

Aikens thought for a moment.

“Yes,” he said finally. “What’s today’s date?”

At ten A.M. on the Tuesday following, the Royal Coach trundled off down the tracks toward Southampton, bearing the King, his personal servants, and a monarch’s idea of luggage for a vacation. That was all subterfuge and window dressing, made complete by the presence of one of William V’s doubles.

The real King was aboard one of two identical RAF turbo-copters which had touched down on the palace helipad before dawn. The first had ferried diplomatic mail to Heathrow; the second carried the Home Secretary to an industrial conference in Birmingham. Both headed for Burton-upon-Trent when then-face missions were complete. His mail had had the King and his technical advisor for company; the Home Secretary, a narrowband multi-channel receiver pulled from the warehouse once known as the Royal College of Science.

A third turbocopter, this with Medivac markings, had filed a flight plan to Oxford, taken on six passengers, and lifted off from Heathrow. It too, was bound for Burton-upon-Trent, carrying Aikens, Schmidt, and Anofi. Eddington, Aikens had been told apologetically, was in Maudsley Hospital in Croyden and unable to travel. There was no further word on why he was there, and Aikens wondered to himself if Eddington was some sort of hostage to guarantee their behavior.

Not that there was any chance of them escaping. Except perhaps for Anofi, it was not in their nature, and besides, the three Royal Marines escorting them were alert and well-armed.

While Anofi and Schmidt chatted happily, obviously of the mind that their troubles were over and the detection of the signal a mere formality, Aikens occupied himself with calculating the coordinates which would be used for the intercept. His own good spirits were chastened by the recognition that there were many ways the trip could end badly for them, and but one chance it could end well. If the coordinates were good, if the equipment was adequate, if die transmission had continued, if… Worry made the short trip longer.

They were the last to land on the close-cropped pasture adjoining the INTELSAT station. The gleaming white dish, some twenty metres across, was inclined southward at the low angle Aikens expected of an antenna trained on a geosynchronous satellite. On disembarking, Schmidt became dismayed at the sight of it.

“It’s a fixed dish,” he said in disbelief.

“No, it’s movable. Hand gearing, though,” Aikens said, pointing to the mounting. “We’re certainly not going to be doing any tracking.”

“That’s all right—the intensity curve will let us get a measurement of the width in space of the beacon and calculate backward to estimate the distance to the source,” Anofi said.

“Optimist,” Schmidt muttered. King William came to join them as they walked up the slight rise to the station gate.

“I have some news of your friend,” he said as he reached them. “Apparently he has quite lost his grip, became depressed, tried to kill himself. They’re keeping an eye on him at Maudsley. If you succeed here, the staff may want to talk to you on our return.”

“If we’re not, will they just give him a razor?” asked Anofi sotto voce.

“Thank you for informing us,” Aikens said.

“I’m very sorry not to have better news. Were there any signs?”

Aikens thought quickly of Eddington’s volatility, his treatment of Agatha, his possessiveness about the message, and his obsession about its contents. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there were. He was living on the edge. The trial must have pushed him over.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” he said, and paused. “Jenkins tells me that the unit we brought with us is rack-compatible with the INTELSAT equipment. I’m not certain I understand, but he assures me that means the electronics will be ready by the time the dish is reoriented.”

Aikens looked at his watch. “I’ll set it up to allow ninety minutes. We can always chase it if we run late—it’ll be in the sky for several hours yet.”

While Schmidt peered over the shoulders of the technicians installing the receiver, Anofi saw to the recording equipment, and Aikens supervised the repositioning of the dish. The last was accomplished not by hand, as Aikens had predicted, but with an electric hand drill placed in fittings on the dish cradle—one for altitude, one for azimuth.

An hour and a quarter later, they were all gathered in the station’s crowded control room. “We’re set up to record the data on that minicomp over there, but you’ll see it here on this display,” Anofi said, pointing to a large monitor. Two flat oscilloscopelike traces tracked across the screen, one near the middle and one at the bottom.

“That’s a real-time display of the output from the receiver at the two frequencies the message used—1455 megahertz and 1525 megahertz,” she said. “It’s flat now because the unit is off. When we turn it on we’ll get some small amount of noise and, we hope, the waveforms of the message.” She looked at Aikens, and he nodded. She twisted a knob at the console and looked up at the screen expectantly.

The traces became ragged lines, with many small peaks and valleys. “Well, there’s the noise,” she said, frowning.

“We have about ten minutes before the source passes the telescope’s line of sight,” Aikens said quickly. “We don’t know the angular size of the source. If we pick it up four minutes early, it’s two degrees; two minutes, one degree; one minute, half a degree. If it’s a point source we may only get it on the fly.”

“Should have it by 2:12, then,” said one of the INTELSAT technicians.

They waited, first in silence, then with a buzz of whispered conversations as the trace continued to display nothing but noise. The voices stilled briefly again at 2:07, when an INTELSAT man switched on an overhead speaker and filled the room with an unmodulated hiss.

“The voice of the Universe,” Schmidt said to himself.

At 2:10, with the hiss now grating and the trace still flat, Aikens rose to stand over the console by Anofi. Behind him the conversations rose to normal speaking levels.

“I thought we’d have it by now,” he said to her.

“So did I. It is a small dish.”

“It’s big enough. It should be a strong signal.”

“It’s not there,” she said quietly as 2:10 came and went without incident.

“Or we’re not.” He turned to the others. “I’m going to advance the dish several degrees to give us an opportunity to recheck the signal path.” Picking up the drill, he headed out the door. A Royal Marine trailed after him.

They watched a second time for the twitch in the traces which would mean the interception of the signal. This time there was less expectation and more skepticism. Aikens snatched a glance at King William from time to time. What little expression showed on his face was not one of pleasure.

Again the time came and went with no change. Aikens whirled and thrust the drill into the hands of the Royal Marine. “Jog it two degrees immediately and then a half degree every two minutes beginning at 2:42,” he ordered. The Marine looked to his commander, who nodded agreement.

“Two degrees now, then a half degree every two minutes,” the soldier repeated.

“Yes! Get going,” Aikens said, turning back to the console. He called back explanations to the rest of the group. “I’m trusting that will keep the dish sufficiently on-axis to allow us to do a few things. The fust efforts we made assumed three things—that they have not switched off the beacon, that it runs continuously, and that the frequency would not be changed.

“None of those is a rock-solid assumption. They may have their own political considerations or research priorities that made the beacon a one-time effort, in which case we’re in trouble. They may not be able to afford the energy to broadcast continuously, in which case we just have to wait for the next transmission period. Or they may try a variety of frequencies over a period of time, in which case we have to get lucky.

“At one time there were analyzers which could check 8 million channels simultaneously, in a variety of bandwidths. We can check two channels at a time. I’m going to leave one where it is, and with the other one, widen the bandwidth and try to check as much of the l gig to 10 gig portion of the spectrum as we can until the source sets or we find it. Anyone who finds this boring is welcome to leave, but this is the way science really works.”

Several took him up on his invitation, mostly station staff.

For twenty minutes he sat at the receiver pressing the programming buttons to scan at five megahertz intervals, listening briefly to each channel and glancing up at the display before continuing on. On reaching the original setting of 1455 megahertz he paused, and rose to get a drink from the fountain at the back wall of the room. Sitting down again, he sighed and continued the slow climb up the radio stairway.

One minute and three steps later, the ceiling speakers gave forth a startlingly loud chirrup that brought King William up out of his seat and tears to Schmidt’s eyes.

“Is that it? Is that it?” the monarch demanded. His eyes locked on the marching-skyline-shaped lower trace.

“Just a moment,” Aikens said, resetting the second channel to fifteen megahertz higher. A second, a slightly higher-pitched chirrup began to play a mesmerizing counterpoint to the first tone, and the second trace kicked upward into a pattern that complemented that of the lower.

“That’s it,” Aikens confirmed, his voice tremulous. He slumped forward, propped his elbows on the edge of the console, and buried his face in his hands. As the hubbub of celebration rose around him and the doors crashed as the station staff hastened back, he felt Anofi’s fingers tracing comforting circles on his shoulder blades and looked up. She smiled, wrinkling her nose at him, and clasped his hand in a moment of shared thanks and relief.

“Larry should have been here,” she said, and Aikens was surprised to realize that he, too, had been thinking of Eddington.

For the trip back to London, the scientists were allowed to shed their guards and board the same turbocopter as the King. Though outwardly identical to the others, the craft’s cabin was more comfortably appointed—more loungelike than military, though hardly a royal extravagance.

As soon as they were airborne King William pivoted his seat to face them. “For what you have done these last months, and today—I think the world owes you much,” he said. “Before we become too wrapped up in it to realize its importance, I wanted to tell you that.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say, ‘Before you’re executed…,’ ” said Aikens. “What is our status now? I presume you will overturn the convictions.”

“No,” King William said firmly.

The scientists’ shock was a tangible presence in the compartment. “What do you mean?” demanded Anofi. “We’ve proven ourselves—everything we claimed.”

King William nodded agreeably. “Nominally, I am empowered to overrule the court and set you free. But in fact, I’m not free to exercise that power, because it proceeds from the legislative whim of the House of Commons. You find this odd, but your release would draw more attention than your conviction. More attention and more questions than we can afford at the moment.

“We need at the very least several weeks to work unimpeded, perhaps as much as several years. We don’t want to be watched. Nor do we want the House of Commons thinking about how to reign in a King who doesn’t know his place. No, what I think would be best is if I order your sentences commuted to, say, ten years’ service to the Crown. We will need you, you know. The job is just beginning.”

“You’re not being fair to us, Your Majesty,” said Schmidt. “I resent the implication that making us indentured servants is the only way we can be trusted to stay on the project.”

“I expected you would. I’m sorry. I’m afraid that in this case what is just and what is possible are not the same,” King William said decisively.

“And there are other considerations,” said a burly man in a military uniform seated near the front of the cabin. “Possibly in time, we will want to tell everyone about your discovery. But for the immediate future, we’ll want to be very selective about who we tell. Having you still under sentence will give me a way of seeing that that wish is respected.”

“But we’re not guilty,” Anofi protested.

“Oh, but you are,” King William said quickly. “That is the state our laws are in now. That is the state our minds are in now.” He stared out the window and shook his head. “If only this had come twenty-five years ago! It might well have saved us from so much of what’s happened. In any event, we’d have been so much more ready than we are now. Now there’s so much to do.”

“Do?” said a slender aide who stood near the back of the cabin. “There’s nothing to do but wait for them to come, and pray
they
are God’s creatures, too. Pray the optimists were right and Wells was wrong.”

“Oh, no,” said the King. “We can do much more than that.” He looked to Aikens. “You understand, I’m sure. Doubtless you’ve been thinking about what should be done next. What are your recommendations?”

How much dare I ask for? Aikens wondered to himself. An hour ago I knew where I stood. Now…

“The signal itself still needs much study,” Aikens said cautiously. “Not only to try to determine its source more accurately, but for what it might tell us of their technology. Beyond that—well, they said that they had been monitoring ‘our many transmissions.’ Presumably they meant our television or radio signals. But there’s been little of that now for a score of years. How will they take our sudden silence? Will they think that we destroyed ourselves and cancel their plans to meet us? We shouldn’t leave them guessing.”

“Yes,” said Anofi. “We must compose an answer and build the transmitter beacon to send it. That should have highest priority.”

“I suspect that if they were beings of any curiosity whatsoever, even if they believed we had destroyed ourselves, they would still come to see our ruins and to find out what we were,” said Schmidt. “Nevertheless I agree—we must send an answer.”

William unbuckled his harness and, grasping an overhead handhold as the craft swayed slightly, drew himself up to his full height.

“You disappoint me,” King William said. His tone underlined his annoyance. “I don’t think you quite understand. Perhaps some of the things that are said about you scientists are correct—that you only see your own little part of the world, that you lack a world sense. Damn it all, this isn’t your drawing room hobby any more. Is it too big for you or too outrageous? Don’t you believe in your own aliens?”

“I find myself believing by degrees. With each step I let go of another quantum of my skepticism,” said Aikens slowly. “There’s a part of me that won’t believe until I see something I can touch.”

“I’ve always believed,” Anofi said quietly.

“Then you at least should know that this calls for far more than a simple answer. That will do for them. But what of us?” asked King William. “If a man rings up his house and tells the staff that unexpected guests are coming, he expects more than that they acknowledge the call. Don’t you see? We’ve just received our call. It’s time to put the house in order.”

Within a week, Aikens, Anofi, and Schmidt found themselves relocated to a former NATO listening post located within sight of Bude Bay. At their direction, it was quickly converted into a workable radio observatory with equipment pulled from Mullard, Cambridge, and points unknown by a skilled scavenger named Bart Whitehead.

Since disembarking that day, they had not seen or heard from King William himself. Their contact was Air Admiral Curtis Chance, the burly man who had accompanied them back to London. He made clear that King William was busy enough that, unless they made some discovery large enough to warrant his direct attention, they should attend to what they did best and leave the King to set his own priorities. But he promised that their reports would be forwarded to the monarch.

That arrangement only increased their feeling of having been cut off from the one outsider who had been sympathetic to them. But perhaps “had been” was part of the problem. After his reproof of them on the way back from Burton-upon-Trent, King William had not discussed his plans with them nor explained exactly what he meant by “put the house in order.”

Through Whitehead they heard rumors of a sharp increase in diplomatic traffic, both human and electronic. They asked after the aides who had accompanied them to Burton-upon-Trent and learned that all were of late rarely seen.

But Whitehead himself knew little more than that he had been told to provide the team, insofar as he was able, with whatever they needed. It was not uncommon for him to say, “And what need would you have of that?” when reviewing a requisition list, but it was clear that he did not expect an answer.

Aikens wondered if Whitehead represented some sort of test of their trustworthiness. Though it seemed out of character perhaps for King William, that was not true of Air Admiral Chance, whose influence on the monarch was unknown and worrisome. Schmidt was convinced William was already notifying the governments of friendly nations, while Anofi with typical cynicism grumbled that the monarch would release the information only when it could be peddled for money or influence or both.

All felt at times that they had merely traded one prison for another, since their travel outside the compound was restricted to an occasional recreational bicycle ride with an Air Police escort, and the nearest town, Clovelly, was off limits. But at least this prison offered them some stimulation for the mind.

The work progressed reasonably well. Within a month, the telescope was performing adequately, though not approaching the capabilities of the facilities to which they had been accustomed at Mullard. Aikens found himself more than once speaking in wistful terms about the eight-dish Five-kilometre Telescope and the computers it had been linked with.

But the current problems always cut such reveries short.

The broadcast frequency had continued to climb upward at a slow but steady pace. In itself the shift added an annoying complication to the daily observations, but even worse, it was bringing the beacon inexorably into a noisier band in which reception was becoming more difficult.

They spent many hours trying to find ways around the telescope’s limitations. The computer could not handle aperture synthesis, and without a second dish at a remote location, they could not perform any long baseline interferometry. Consequently there was no hope of mapping the source in any detail. The signal continued to be smeared over an area of the sky several arc-minutes in diameter and therefore over the positions of hundreds of stars and other celestial objects. Anofi was betting the source was one arc-minute or smaller in diameter, but she had no proof as yet. On the phis side, she had proven to the general satisfaction of all that the source was not extragalactic, and was most likely in local space.

In the meantime Aikens had occupied himself with the untranslated sequence at the end of the message, some general supervision, and the generation of numerous lists and memos. One of the last catalogued candidate stars according to the team’s recalculation of the epoch 1950 positions. They ranged from Eta Cassiopeia, just 18 light-years away, to Delta Cassiopeia, possibly out of range at its listed distance of 45 light-years.

But narrowing the list would require more accurate observations and then confirmation via a first-class optical instrument—which to Aikens’s knowledge did not exist anywhere in the British Isles. What group in what nation could or would cooperate none felt confident to predict.

Lacking guidance from King William on what or even whether they should be thinking about an answer beacon, Aikens took it upon himself to bring them together for daily meetings to hash out what the content of a reply message should be. As different as their outlooks were, the meetings were highly charged at times. But perversely, the sessions helped to keep them intellectually sharp and emotionally united around their task—to keep them pointed forward.

As for a means of sending the message, Schmidt’s design for a transmitter rig was complete even if the necessary components had been refused them. The refusal was forthright; Chance told them that he didn’t want the capability to transmit existing before there was agreement on what would be transmitted. But Schmidt, who had taken that portion of the work for his own, still expected permission to perform a low-power proof-of-design test using a high-flying plane before much more time passed.

More and more Aikens found himself wondering what the monarch was up to. Presently he came to realize that he would likely not be told unless he had something of substance to trade. He cut back the forty-eight-hour reports to simple summaries of activity, rather than findings, but there was no reaction from whoever saw them in London.

Then, one evening some two months after their arrival at the observatory, Aikens found the lever he was looking for. He found it in an expected place, in the final sequence of the message, but in an unexpected way. In a moment of relaxation, stacking papers on his desk so as to be able to start smoothly the next morning, his eye fell on two bits of information in just the right sequence.

The first was the original A and B frequencies: 1445 MHz, 1525 MHz. The second was the numeric rendering of
addeghn-rorgh
:A-l, A-4, A-4, A-5… Though the Senders had erred on the symbol for gigahertz, the frequencies and the translation were the same.

Aikens realized in that moment why the beacon’s received frequency had been climbing, and why the Senders had thoughtfully included the transmitted frequency for reference. At that moment, he set aside all thoughts of dealings and trades, and saw or thought he did what King William had meant in the turbocopter, understood what had to be done.

“You were right. Sending a reply message is a thoroughly inadequate response,” he wrote in his dispatch to King William. “Final sequence of message decoded this date contains broadcast frequencies. Doppler shift in received frequency means that Sender ship is now en route and accelerating toward us. Present speed is approximately 6% of the speed of light. Since their homeworld cannot be more than 44 light-years away and is more likely 30 or less, there is a high probability the Senders will arrive within 100 years, and a possibility that they could arrive within fifteen years or less.”

Before transmitting, Aikens stopped and thought about what he had written. Through the intervention of a benevolent Universe, humanity was not alone. Some other planet orbiting some other sun harbored life, intelligent life.

His view of the cosmos had always allowed for such things, but had never required them. It was a fascinating topic in the abstract, and the only great drawback was that the abstract was the sole arena in which it could be discussed. No one knew, and despite pretensions to the contrary, it seemed unlikely that anyone could know. Life elsewhere was left as a wide-open field for unbridled speculation, imaginative art, and some diverting fiction.

But very soon, the speculative would become the tangible. Some unknowable alien intelligence was en route to Earth—and Aikens himself might live to see its arrival.

He cradled and savored the unabashed and uncluttered feeling of awe that thought aroused in him. It was the closest thing to a religious moment he had felt since childhood, and he said a silent thank you without stopping to wonder who or what he was thanking.

Then he got up and went to the communications room to encode and send the message.

Nearly twelve hours to the minute later, an RAF turbocopter roared down out of the calm, clear morning sky to land in the clearing north of the generator shed. Aikens was the only one at the complex who was not surprised that, when it took off again twenty minutes later, he was aboard. He wondered what King William’s reaction had been to his news.

Aikens had longer than he had expected to think about it, because to his surprise the craft had been sent to carry him not over the fields of Wiltshire to London, but over the English Channel and the vineyards of France to the lake city of Geneva.