Fiasco (17 page)

"Yes."

"All right, then. Having sifted through two hundred million stars, we came up with eleven million candidates. The majority have lifeless planets, or planets below the window, or planets above the window. Imagine"—he clapped him on the knee—"that you have fallen in love with the portrait of a sixteen-year-old girl. You set out to woo her. Unfortunately, the journey will take fifty years. You'll find an old woman, or a grave. If you decide to declare your love by mail, you'll be an old man yourself before you receive the first reply. And that, in a nutshell, is the basic idea of CETI. You can't hold a conversation at intervals of many centuries."

"So we're traveling to a pupa?" asked "Mark." For a while now people called him that, but suddenly the thought occurred to him—he didn't know why—that the idea might have come from the monk, who, like himself, both was and was not a member of the crew.

"We don't know
what
we're traveling to," remarked Arago. Lauger seemed pleased by these words.

"Quite. Life-producing planets are recognized by the composition of their atmospheres. The catalogue of these, in our galaxy, runs into the thousands. We've screened them all and have about thirty that offer hope."

"Of intelligence?"

"Intelligence, in diapers, is invisible. And when it matures, out the window it flies. We have to pounce on it earlier. How do we know that our destination is worth the trouble? It's Quinta, the fifth planet of Zeta Harpyiae. We have a lot of data—"

"
In dubio pro reo
," said the Dominican.

"And who, Father, in your opinion, is the defendant?" Lauger asked, but again did not let him answer, continuing:

"The first cosmic symptom of intelligence is radio. Well before radioastronomy. Actually, not that much before: about a hundred years. A planet with transmitters can be detected when their combined power goes into the gigawatts. Quinta emits, in the high and ultrahigh ranges, less than its sun, but a phenomenal amount for a lifeless planet. For a planet with electronics, a moderate amount, since it lies below the level of solar noise. But
something
is there, in radio, below the threshold. We have evidence."

"Circumstantial," the apostolic delegate corrected him again.

"True, and only one piece," agreed Lauger. "But, more important, there have been observed on Quinta point-bursts of electromagnetism, one of which was recorded—the whole emission—by a spectroscope from orbiters near Mars. Those two orbiters cost Earth a bundle: our expedition."

"Atomic bombs?" asked the man who was resigned to the name of Mark.

"No. Rather, the preliminaries to planetary engineering, because these were clean thermonuclears. Had things on Quinta taken the course they did on Earth, it would have started with the uranides. What's more, the bursts appeared only within the polar circle—that is, on their Arctica or Antarctica. One could melt a continental glacier in this way. But that is not the point on which we differ." He glanced at the Dominican. "The question is whether or not our arrival will cause harm
there.
Father Arago believes it might. I am of the same opinion…"

"Then what is the disagreement?"

"I believe that the game is worth the candle. The exploration of a world, without causing harm, is impossible."

Mark began to understand the gist of the debate. He forgot his own situation; the old fire returned to him.

"You—that is, Father—are traveling with us … against your convictions?" he addressed the monk.

"Of course," said Arago. "The Church was among the opponents to the expedition. So-called contact could turn out to be the gift of a Trojan horse.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
A Pandora's box."

"You have become affected, Father, by the mythological patronage of the project," laughed Lauger. "Eurydice, Hermes, Jupiter, Hades, Cerberus … we plundered the Greeks. The ship actually ought to have been named the
Argo
, with us as the psychonauts. But we'll try to cause as little harm as possible. That's why the plan of the operation is so complex."

"
Contra spem spero
," sighed the monk. "Or, rather," he added, "I wish to be in error."

Lauger seemed not to hear, taken with another thought.

"When we reach Quinta, at least three hundred years will have passed there for our one year of ship's time. Which means that we will be catching them in the upper region of the window. If only not later! A difference of seconds in our maneuvers could hasten or delay us tremendously. As for harm … the Reverend Father knows that a technological civilization has inertia, though it is not stationary. In other words, it's not that easy to throw it off its course. Whatever happens, we will not be in the role of gods descending from heaven. We did not seek out primitive cultures, and there are no astroethnologists in CETI."

Arago, silent, regarded the physicist with narrowed eyes. The listener to this conversation ventured a question:

"But does it make sense?"

"Does what make sense?" Lauger was surprised.

"To treat the ones who are unobservable as if they did not exist. It may be practical, but…"

"You could call it opportunism, too, if you wanted," replied Lauger coldly. "We chose a task that was possible to perform. The window of contact has an empirical frame, but there is ethical justification for it as well. We won't be anointing the heads of cavedwellers with oil distilled by the twenty-second century. But enough of this
pluralis majestaticus.
I stood by the project and I'm here because for me contact means an exchange of knowledge. An exchange—not a patronage, not a dispensing of melioristic advice."

"And what if evil reigns there?" asked Arago.

"Does there exist a universal evil? A constant of evil?" countered Lauger.

"I fear there does."

"Then we would have to say
non possumus
and chuck the project…"

"I am only doing my duty."

With these words the monk rose, nodded to them, and departed.

Lauger, sprawled in his chair, made a face, moved his lips as if there was a bad taste in his mouth, then sighed.

"I respect the man—because he can rile me. He tacks wings onto everything, or horns. But enough. That's not the reason I wanted to see you. We'll be sending a scout ship to Quinta. A single-hull, able to land. The
Hermes.
It will fly nine or ten men. The captain and four have been decided on. The rest will be chosen, by specialty, in a ballot. Would you like to be on the ballot?"

At first Mark did not understand.

"To set foot there…"

He burned. Disbelief, joy. Lauger, seeing how the man lit up, hastened to add:

"Getting on the ballot doesn't necessarily mean you're going. Scientific achievement isn't a guarantee, either. The greatest theoretician could easily go to pieces. We need hard people—the kind that nothing will break. Gerbert is a brilliant psychonicist, psychologist, an expert on minds, but courage isn't tested in the laboratory. Do you know who you are?"

He paled.

"No."

"Then I'll tell you. On the Birnam glacier a number of people in walking machines died. Geyser eruptions took them by surprise. These were professional operators carrying out instructions given them, and they had no idea that they were going to their death. Two men went in search of them, voluntarily. You are one of those two."

"How can you know this? Dr. Gerbert told me that—"

"Dr. Gerbert and his assistant are ship physicians. They know their medicine but are weak when it comes to computers. They decided to preserve medical confidentiality—since it proved impossible to establish the identity of the man resurrected. Psychic trauma, they argued. There's no eavesdropping on the
Eurydice,
but there is a center with nonerasable memory. The Commander has access to it, the Head Informationist, and I. You won't tell the doctors, I hope?"

"No."

"I didn't think you would. It would be doing them wrong."

"But won't they guess if…"

"I doubt it. The doctors have to monitor constantly the state of health of our entire crew. And the voting is secret. The council votes. Out of five votes you should get three. That's my guess. And I'm telling you this now because you have a hell of a lot of work ahead of you. I know that on the simulators you showed an astrogational ability, but in obsolete categories, first-class for those times—not for today. You have a year to learn your interstellar ABCs. If you can handle that, you'll see the Quintans. And now go—I have a pile of things to catch up on."

They rose. Mark was taller than the famous physicist, and younger. "He won't be going," he thought. Lauger walked him to the door.

But Mark did not notice this, did not see the darting lights on the black screen, did not remember if he said good-bye or even if he said anything. Or how he got back to his cabin. He did not know what to do with himself. Going to the closet, he opened the wrong door by mistake, saw his face in the mirror, and murmured:

"You'll see the Quintans."

So he began his studies.

The result of the statistical calculations was, all in all, clear. Life arose and endured on planets for billions of years, but throughout that time it was mute. Civilizations sprang from it: not to perish but to transform themselves into something extranatural. Because the birth rate of technologies in an ordinary spiral galaxy was a constant, they came into being, matured, and disappeared with the same frequency. New ones were continually emerging, and they escaped from the interval of mutual understanding—the window of contact—before it was possible to exchange signals with them. The muteness of those existing primitively was obvious. But endless hypotheses were devoted to the silence of the highly developed. There was a whole library on the subject, which he avoided for the time being. In one book he read: "At this moment, for this century (astronomically, the same thing), it can be concluded that Earth is the only civilization
already
technological and
still
biological throughout the length, breadth, and depth of the Milky Way."

Which seemed to lay to rest the plans of CETI. A hundred and fifty years went by before it turned out that this was not the case.

The conquering of the space separating star from star, so that some Living Intelligences could meet Others and return, was not accomplishable by simple flight. Even if the astronauts traveled at speeds approaching light, they would neither meet those to whom they were going nor see again those who remained behind on Earth: at both destination and origin many centuries would pass in the few years of ship time. This categorical declaration of science prompted the Church to reflect theologically as follows: He Who created the world made the meeting of creatures from different stars an idle dream. He raised between them a barrier, completely empty and invisible yet impossible to break: an abyss that He could cross, not man. Human history, however, invariably went in directions that were not predicted. The abyss of space turned out indeed to be a barrier that could not be broken. But it could be sidestepped, through a series of special maneuvers.

The median time of the galaxy was one value. The galaxy itself was a clock that indicated the hour of its age. But in places of the greatest intensity of gravitation, galactic time underwent violent changes. There were boundaries at which it stopped altogether. These were the Schwarzschild spheres—the black surfaces of collapsed stars. Event horizons. An object approaching such a horizon would begin to stretch in the eyes of a distant observer; it would disappear before touching the surface of the black hole, because time, dilated by gravitation, displaced light toward the infrared and then to longer and longer wavelengths, until finally not one reflected photon returned to the eye of the watcher. The black hole trapped within its horizon every particle and every scrap of light forever.

In any case, a traveler approaching a black hole would be pulled apart, along with his ship, by the growing gravitation. Tidal forces there would lengthen any material object to a thread, and from the accretion disk formed around the black sphere that thread would go into a nose dive from which there was no return.

Flybys past the collapsar star were impossible—along any trajectory: the tidal forces would kill the travelers and rip their ship to pieces. The ship could be the densest cosmic dwarf, a neutron star, a globe of atomic nuclei packed together into a solid, a solid compared with which the hardest steel would be as attenuated as a gas: it would make no difference. Even such a globe the collapsar would pull out into a spindle shape, and would tear and swallow it in an instant, leaving behind only the death-throe flares of X rays escaping into space.

Collapsars that arose from stars a few times heavier than the Sun were thus like sudden guillotines to wayfarers. If, however, the mass of a black hole was a hundred or a thousand times that of the Sun, the gravitation at its horizon could be as weak as Earth's. No immediate danger would threaten the ship that ventured there, and the crew, moving toward such a horizon, could completely fail to notice it. But they would never be able to emerge from beneath that unseen shell. A ship drawn into a giant collapsar would be annihilated, plummeting to the center, in a matter of days or hours, depending on the massiveness of the trap.

The astrophysics at the close of the twentieth century drew such theoretical models of gravitational graveyards. But, as usually happened in the history of knowledge, the models proved insufficient. The reality was more complex. First, quantum mechanics had to be taken into account: every black hole gave off radiation. The larger the black hole, the weaker the radiation. Giant black holes, usually found at the centers of galaxies, would also eventually die, though their "quantum evaporation" might take a hundred billion years. They would be the final relics of the former stellar splendor of the Universe.

Further diversification of black holes was discovered by subsequent calculation and simulation. A star, when it collapsed, its weakened centrifugal radiation no longer able to counteract its gravity, did not immediately assume the shape of a sphere. It oscillated, like a drop alternately flattened to a disk and then pulled into a cigar shape. This vibration was very brief, the frequency depending on the mass. The collapsar behaved like a gong—that struck itself. But a gong at rest could be made to vibrate by a blow. A black sphere, similarly, could be set to oscillating again—by sidereal engineering. One had to know the method and possess sufficient power, on the order of 10
⁴⁴
ergs, which would be beamed in such a way as to put the sphere in resonance. For what purpose? To create what the astrophysicists acquainted with the giant casually called a "temporal onion."