Fiasco (21 page)

Ter Horab returned to his cabin before the scene was over. He had seventy-nine difficult hours ahead of him—of sidereal manipulations with the gracer of the
Orpheus,
to create a temporal port in the gravitational resonances. And then to enter it—or, rather, to become submerged in it—since this meant being cut off completely from the outside world.

The ignition order, sent to the
Orpheus,
took two days to reach it, and it was in that time that the several strange phenomena took place on Quinta. Up until the moment that their instruments were totally blinded, the astrophysicists tuned into the entire galactic emission from the region of the Harpy. The spectra of the Alpha, Delta, and Zeta stars in no way changed, which was an important test of the quality of the reception of Quinta. The radiation reaching the
Eurydice
from the planet was filtered, and the different exposures were compared, superimposed, and sharpened by computer cascade amplifiers. At the highest visual magnification, the Zeta system was a spot that a match head held at arm's length would cover.

The attention of the planetologists was focused, naturally, on Quinta. Its spectro- and holograms created not so much an image of the planet as a computer guess. Because the source of information was diverging photons spread out erratically over the whole spectrum of radiation, there was at the observatory on the
Eurydice
—just as at the observatories on Earth long ago, with the first telescopes—no agreement on the critical question of
what was actually seen and what only seemed to be seen.

The mind of man, like any system processing information, could not draw a sharp line between certainty and conjecture. Observation was hindered by Quinta's sun, Zeta, by the gas plume of its largest globe, Septima, and by the strong emission of the stellar background. So far, it was found that in many physical respects Quinta did resemble Earth. The atmosphere contained 29 percent oxygen; there was plenty of water vapor and about 60 percent nitrogen. The white polar caps, having a high albedo, could be seen even from the vicinity of Earth's sun. The ring of ice must have arisen during the flight of the
Eurydice,
or at least reached the proportions that made it visible. Now, viewed from the cosmic neighborhood, the artificial nature of Quinta's radio intensity was beyond question. Discharges from atmospheric storms could not possibly have been a factor. In radio intensity in the shortwave range, Quinta equaled the corresponding emission of its own sun. The same thing had happened with Earth after the global spread of television.

The results of the observations made shortly before the plunge into the gravitational harbor were a shock. Ter Horab immediately summoned the experts. The council's only line of action was to diagnose as quickly as possible what was taking place on the planet and to send that message after the scout ship. The message, coded in the alphabet of high-energy quanta, would overtake the
Hermes
and its unconscious crew. DEUS would receive the message and convey it to the people upon their reanimation at the edge of the Zeta system. The stellar message was to be encoded so that only DEUS could read it. Caution was indicated: the changes on Quinta were alarming.

1) Several series of brief flashes above the thermosphere and ionosphere of the planet had been recorded, also between it and its moon—about two hundred thousand kilometers from Quinta. The flashes lasted thirty to forty nanoseconds. Spectrally, they matched the solar emission, with the radiation cut off in the infrared and ultraviolet.

2) After each of these series of flashes, which took many hours, there appeared on the face of the planet, in the intertropical zone, dark streaks on both sides of the ice ring.

3) At the same time, the emission of approximately meter-length waves increased, exceeding all previously observed maxima, while the emission of the southern hemisphere weakened.

4) Immediately before the council met, a bolometer aimed at the center of the planet's face registered a sharp drop in temperature on the order of 180 degrees Kelvin, with a slow return to equilibrium. The cold spot had an area equal to Australia. At first the cloud cover vanished above the spot, surrounding it on all sides with a very bright embankment of clouds; before the clouds returned, the bolometer located the "cold source" at a single point in the exact center of the spot. Thus the sudden cooling had expanded, from a source of unknown nature, in a circular front.

5) On Quinta's large moon there appeared—in the dark hemisphere, not facing the sun—a point flash that flickered—moved independently of the motion of the moon's surface. As if, just above the crust, through an arc of one-ten-thousandth of a second, a flame traveled, made of atomic plasma at a temperature of a million degrees Kelvin.

6) As the council began deliberating, the cold spot disappeared beneath the clouds, and then the cloud cover obscured the surface of Quinta to an extent unprecedented: 92 percent of the planet's face.

The opinions of the specialists, as one might have guessed, were divided. The first hypothesis that leaped to mind—of nuclear explosions, whether as tests or as warfare—could be discarded without further discussion: the flashes had nothing in common spectrally either with explosions of the uranides or with thermonuclear reactions. The exception was the plasmatic spark on the moon, but its thermonuclear spectrum was continuous. One thought of an open hydrogen-helium reactor in a magnetic vise. To the nucleonics people the purpose of such a reactor was a mystery.

The flashes in space nearer the planet could come from specially tuned lasers hitting metallic objects—nickel and magnetite meteors, possibly—or from the collision of bodies of high iron, nickel, and titanium content, if they collided head-on and at speeds on the order of 80 to 100 km/sec. But neither could one rule out as source converter mirrors (which absorbed a portion of the sun's waves) exploding because of malfunctions.

The council got into a heated debate; the experts disagreed with one another. There was talk of climate control with the aid of very large photoconverters, and of photoelectric cells—which, however, had no connection with the focus of cold at the equator. But the most astounding thing was the result of the Fourier analysis done on the entire radio spectrum of Quinta. All trace of modulation disappeared, while at the same time the power of the transmitters increased. A radiolocation map of the planet showed hundreds of transmitters of white noise, which merged into shapeless blotches. Quinta was emitting noise on all wavelengths. The noise was either the scrambling of broadcast signals or a kind of coded communication concealed by the semblance of chaos—or else it was chaos indeed, created intentionally.

Ter Horab demanded an immediate answer to the question of
what
should be beamed to the
Hermes
within the next few hours, since all contact with it would be severed after that. More to the point: for what should the reconnoiterers prepare themselves, and how should they proceed once they were in the Zeta system?

The reconnaissance program had been worked out long before, but it was obviously impossible for them to have taken into account the phenomena just observed.

At first no one was anxious to take the floor. Finally the astromatician Tuym, as a spokesman for the advisory group SETI, said with undisguised reluctance that no helpful advice could be sent to the
Hermes.
They should list the facts, provide a hypothetical explanation, and rely on the independent judgment of the crew.

Ter Horab wanted to hear some hypotheses—it did not matter if they were mutually contradictory.

"Whatever the changes on Quinta are, they are not signals directed at us," said Tuym. "On that we are all agreed. Some believe that Quinta has noticed our presence and is preparing itself, in its own way, to receive the
Hermes.
This is not an idea based on rational data, it is simply—in
my
opinion—an expression of anxiety, or, to put it plainly, fear. A very old and primitive fear, which at one time gave rise to nightmares of cosmic invasion. I consider such an explanation of the phenomena to be nonsense."

Ter Horab preferred specifics. The people of the reconnaissance mission could decide for themselves whether they should be afraid or not. It was the mechanism of the new phenomena that interested him.

"Our astrophysicists have specific hypotheses. They can present them," replied Tuym, unruffled by the sarcasm of the Commander's words, since it was not directed at him.

"Who?" asked Ter Horab.

Tuym indicated Nystedt and Fecteau.

"The jumps in temperature and albedo could have been caused by a meteor swarm entering Quinta's system and colliding with artificial satellites. That could have produced the flashes," said Nystedt.

"How do you explain the similarity of the surface flashes to the spectrum of Zeta?"

"Some of the satellites of Quinta could be hunks of ice broken off from the outer edge of the ring. They would reflect the sunlight in our direction only at certain angles of incidence and reflection—randomly. They would be irregular solids, with different orbital moments."

"And what about the cold spot?" asked the Commander. "Who knows the possible ways it could have come about?"

"That's unclear—though we could come up with some natural mechanism…"

"An ad hoc hypothesis," Tuym remarked.

"I talked this over with the chemists," said Lauger. "An endothermic reaction could have taken place there. I'm not comfortable with such an oddity, I admit, but there
are
compounds that absorb heat when they react. The accompanying circumstances, however, point to something more dramatic."

"To what?" asked Ter Horab.

"An unnatural cause, though not necessarily one that has intention. For example—an accident in some enormous refrigeration devices, in cryogenic equipment. Like a fire in an industrial complex, but with a negative sign. But this doesn't seem very likely to me, either. I have no facts on which to base such an assertion—none of us have—but the very proximity in time of all these changes suggests that they are somehow connected."

"The value of your hypothesis also has a negative sign," said one of the physicists.

"I don't think so. The reduction of many unknowns to a common unknown denominator represents a gain, not a loss, in information," replied Lauger easily.

"Please go on," the Commander said to him. Lauger stood.

"I'll say what I can. An infant, smiling, smiles according to assumptions that it has brought with it into the world. These assumptions, of a statistical nature, are multitudinous: that the pinkish blobs its little eyes perceive are people's faces, that people usually react positively to the smile of a baby, and so on."

"What is your point?"

"That everything is based on certain assumptions, though the assumptions, as a rule, are made silently. Our discussion deals with events that appear very improbable as a series of unrelated things—the flashes, the chaotic emission, the changes in Quinta's albedo, the plasma on the moon. What caused them? you ask. The activity of a civilization. Does this clarify anything? On the contrary, it mystifies, because we began with the tacit assumption that we would be able to understand the actions of the Quintans.

"Mars, as I recall, was once considered old, and Venus young, in comparison with Earth: the great-grandfathers of our astronomers automatically assumed that Earth was the same as Mars and Venus, except younger than the first and older than the second. Hence, the canals of Mars, the wild jungles of Venus, et cetera, which eventually all had to be chucked out as fairy tales. I don't think anything can behave as unintelligently as intelligence. There may be a mind on Quinta—or minds—inaccessible to us because of a difference in purposes…"

"War?" The voice came from the back of the hall.

Lauger, still standing, continued.

"War is not an absolutely closed set of conflicts with destruction as the resultant. Commander—don't count on being enlightened. Since we know neither the initial states nor the parameters, nothing can turn the unknowns into knowns. All we can tell the
Hermes
is to proceed with caution. You would prefer more specific advice? I can only offer two possibilities: the actions of those intelligences are unintelligent—or else unintelligible, not fitting in the categories of our thought. But this is only an opinion, nothing more."

Before the plunge, the radiolocators tracked the
Hermes
for the last time, showing how it described a great hyperbola across the firmament, rising higher and higher above the arm of the galactic spiral, in order that in deep vacuum it could travel near the speed of light. Then the radio echoes began to arrive at increasing intervals, a sign that the
Hermes
was experiencing relativistic effects and that its on-board time was diverging from the time of the
Eurydice.
All contact between the scout ship and the mother ship terminated when the signals from the automatic transmitter grew in wavelength, spread to bands of many kilometers, and weakened. The last signal was noted, by the most sensitive indicator, in the seventieth hour after the start, just as Hades, hit by the suiciding
Orpheus,
groaned in gravitational resonance and opened wide its temporal chasms. Whatever might happen to the scout ship and the men locked within it would have to remain unknown for many years (of their time).

For those who slept the sleep of embryonization, a sleep like death—devoid of dreams or any awareness, through dreams, of the passage of time—the flight had no duration. Over the white sarcophagi in the tunnellike embryonator, through the armored glass of the periscope, shone Alpha Harpyiae, a blue giant that had been deflected from the stars of the constellation by one of its own asymmetric eruptions, as it was young and not yet stabilized after the nuclear ignition of its interior. When the
Eurydice
vanished, DEUS took over the controls. The
Hermes,
having climbed above the ecliptic, plummeted like a stone toward Hades, initially retreating from the star of its destination in order to reach it more easily, at the gravitational cost of the collapsar: circling the collapsar, it received from its field a hefty push. Then, at a speed approaching light, the
Hermes
extended from its sides the intakes of the flowstream reactors. Space was so empty that the collected atoms were insufficient for ignition; DEUS therefore excited the hydrogen with injections of tritium until the synthesis finally started. The throats of the engines, black until now, filled with light that pulsed faster and more intensely. Fiery columns of helium spouted into the darkness. The
Eurydice's
laser had given the scout ship less help at the takeoff than expected, since one of the hypergolic boosters misfired, which moved the stern mirror off course—and then the
Eurydice
disappeared, as if swallowed by the void. But DEUS quickly made up for the loss with power borrowed from Hades.