Текст книги "Imperial Earth"

Автор книги: Arthur Charles Clarke

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There was no # or EXECUTE sign at the end of the sequences, but that proved nothing at all, for few people bothered to write down anything so obvious; nine times out of ten, it was omitted as understood. Yet one of the standard ways of canceling a secret ERASE order was to hit EXECUTE twice in quick succession. Another was to do so with a definite interval between the two keyings. Did Karl’s omission have any significance, or was he merely following the usual convention?

The problem contained its own solution, though emotion rather than intelligence pointed the way to it. Duncan could see no flaw, though he explored every possibility that he could imagine. Then, feeling a faint trace of guilt, he tapped out G/T 101000 YDNILAC, pausing for a fraction of a second before he completed the sequence with A

If he was wrong, Calindy would never know what she had lost. And though

Karl’s last message to her might have been erased, none of the other stored memories would be placed in hazard.

His fears were groundless. Duncan heard only the opening words–~“Hello,

Calindy, when you hear this, I shall be…”~—before he hit the STOP key and the Minisec became silent again. He was after bigger game.

Perhaps one day, when he had the time-no, 274 that was a temptation he would be strong enough to resist…. And so, in the secluded luxury of the Centennial Hotel, with a Do NOT

DISTuRB block on all visitors and incoming messages, Duncan keyed G/T 101000 suGRA A For two days he canceled his appointments, and had all meals sent up to his room. Occasionally, he made an outgoing call to check upon some technical point, but most of the time he was alone, communing with the dead.

Finally he was ready to meet the Argus Committee again, on his own terms.

He understood everything -except, of course, the greatest mystery of all.

How delighted Karl would have been if he had ever known about Golden

Reef…. he room had not changed, and perhaps the invisible audience was the same.

But there was now no trace of the slightly uncertain Duncan Makenzie who, only a few days ago, had wondered if he should opt for diplomatic immunity.

They had accepted, without any dispute, his explanation of the word

“Argus,” though he did not imagine they were much impressed by his suddenly acquired knowledge of classical mythology. He could tell from the brief questioning that there was a certain disappointment; perhaps the Committee would have to find some other justification for its existence. (Was there really an organized underground movement on Terra, or was it merely a joke?

This was hardly the right time to ask, though Duncan was tempted.)

Yet, ironically, there was a small conspiracy, in this very room-a conspiracy mutually agreed upon. The Committee had guessed that he now appreciated the significance of the name Argus to Terran security -and he knew that it knew. Each side understood the other perfectly, and the next item of business was quickly adopted.

“So what was Mr. Helmer’s Argus?” asked the woman whom Duncan had tentatively placed up on the Moon. “And can you account for his odd behavior?”

Duncan opened the stained notebook to display 275 that astonishing fall-page sketch which had so transfixed him at its first revelation. Even now that he knew its true scale, he could not think of it as anything except a drawing of a sea urchin. But Diadenta was only thirty or forty centimeters across; Argus would be at least a thousand kilometers in diameter, if Karl’s analysis was right. And of that, Duncan no longer had any doubt, though he could never give his full reasons.

“Karl Helmer had a vision,” he began. “I’ll try to pass it on as best I can, though this is not my field of knowledge. But I knew his psychology, and perhaps I can make you understand what he was trying to do.”

You may be disappointed again, he told himself -you may dismiss the whole concept as a crazy !cientist’s delusion. But you’ll be wrong; this could be infinitely more important than some trivial conspiracy threatening your tidy little world….

“Karl was a scientist, who always hoped to make some great discovery-but never did. Though he was highly imaginative, even his wildest flights were always soundly based on reality. And he was ambitious….”

“If it were so,” murmured a quiet voice from the air beside him, “it was a grievous fault. And grievously hath Caesar answered it. Sorry-please continue

The reference was unfamiliar to Duncan, and he showed his annoyance at the interruption by pausing for a few seconds.

“He was interested in everything-too many things, perhaps-but his great passion was the still unsolved cETi problem—communications with extraterrestrial intelligence. We used to argue about it for hours when we were boys; I could never be quite sure when he was completely serious, but I am now.

“Why have we never detected radio signals from the advanced societies which must surely be out there in space? Karl had many theories, but in the end he settled on the simplest. It’s not original, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before. “We ourselves broadcast radio signals for only

276

about a hundred years, roughly spanning the twentieth century. By the end of that time, we’d switched to cable and optical and satellite systems, concentrating all their power where it was needed, and not spilling most of it wastefully to the stars. This may well be true of all civilizations with a technology comparable to ours. They only pollute the universe with indiscriminate radio noise for a century or two-a very brief fraction of their entire history.

“So even if there are millions of advanced societies in this Galaxy, there may be barely a handful just where we were three hundred years ago-still splashing out radio waves in all directions. And the laws of probability make it most unlikely that any of these early electronic cultures will be within detection range; the nearest may be thousands of light-years away.

“But before we abandon the search, we should explore all the possibilities-and there’s one that has never been investigated, because until now there was little we could do about it. For three centuries, we’ve been studying radio waves in the centimeter and meter bands. But we have almost completely ignored the very long waves-tens and hundreds of kilometers in length.

“Now of course there were several good reasons for this neglect. In the first case, it’s impossible to study these waves on Earth-they don’t get through the ionosphere, and so never reach the surface. You have to go into space to observe them.

“But for the very longest waves, it’s no good merely going up to orbit, or to the other side of the Moon, where CYCLOPS n was built. You have to go halfway out to the limits of the Solar System.

“For the Sun has an ionosphere, just like the Earth’s—except that it’s billions of times larger. It absorbs all waves more than ten or twenty kilometers in length. If we want to detect these, we have to go out to

Saturn.

“Such waves have been observed, but only on a few occasions. About forty years ago, a Solar Survey mission picked them up; it wasn’t looking for radio waves at all, but was measuring magnetic fields between Jupiter and

Saturn. It observed pulsations that must have been due to a radio burst at around fifteen kilohertz, corresponding to a wavelength of twenty kilometers. At first it was thought that they came from Jupiter, which is still full of electromagnetic surprises, but that source was eventually ruled out, and the origin is still a mystery.

“There have been half a dozen observations since then, all of them by instruments that were measuring something else. No one’s looked for these waves directly; you’ll see why in a moment.

“The most impressive example was detected ten years ago, in ‘66, by a team doing a survey of Iapetus. They obtained quite a long recording, rather sharply tuned at nine kilohertz-that’s thirty-three kilometers wavelength.

I thought you might Eke to hear it….”

Duncan consulted a slip of paper and carefully tapped out a long sequence of numbers and letters on the Minisec. Into the anechoic stillness of that strange room, Karl spoke from the grave, in a brisk, businesslike voice.

“This is the complete recording, demodulated and speeded up sixty-four times, so that two hours is compressed into two minutes. Starting now.”

Across twenty years of time, a childhood memory suddenly came back to

Duncan. He recalled listening out into the Titanian night for that scream from the edge of space, wondering if it was indeed the voice of some monstrous beast, yet not really believing his own conjecture, even before

Karl had demolished it. Now that fantasy returned, more powerful than ever.

This sound—or, rather, infrasound, for the original modulation was far below the range of human hearing-was Eke the slow beating of a giant heart, or the tolling of a bell so huge that a cathedral could be placed inside it, rather than the reverse. Or perhaps the waves of the sea, rolling forever in unvarying rhythm against some desolate shore, on a world so old that though Time still existed, Change was dead…. The recording, as it always did, set Duncan’s skin crawling and sent shivers down his spine. And it brought back yet another memory-the image of that mightiest of all Earth’s creatures, leaping in power and

278 glory into the sky above Golden Reef. Could there be beasts among the stars, to whom men would be as insignificant as the lice upon the whale?

It was a relief when the playback came to an end, and Karl’s surprisingly unemotional voice commented: “Note the remarkably constant frequency the original period is 132 seconds, not varying by more than point one percent.

This implies a fairly high Q-say…”

“The rest is technical,” said Duncan, switching off the recording. “I merely wanted you to hear what the Iapetus survey team brought home with them. And it’s something that could never have been picked up inside the orbit of Saturn.”

A voice he had not heard before-young, rather selfassured—came out of the air behind him.

“But this is all old material, familiar to everyone in the field. Sandemann and Koralski showed that those signals were almost certainly relaxation oscillations, probably in a plasma cloud near one of Saturn’s Trojan points.”

Duncan felt his facade of instant expertise rapidly crumbling; he should have guessed that there would be someone in his audience who would know far more about this subject than he did-and possibly, for that matter, even than Karl.

“I’m not competent to discuss that,” he replied. -I’m only reporting Dr.

Helmer’s opinions. He believed that there was a whole new science here, waiting to be opened up. After all, every time we have explored some new region of the spectrum, it’s led to astonishing and totally unexpected discoveries. Helmer was convinced that this would happen again.

“But to study these gigantic waves-up to a million times longer than those observed in classical radio astronomy-we must use correspondingly gigantic antenna systems. Both to collect them-because they’re very weak-and to determine the directions from which they come.

“This was Karl Helmer’s Argus. His records and sketches contain quite detailed designs. I leave it to others to say how practical they are.

“Argus would look in all directions simultaneously like the great missile-tracking radars of the twentieth century. It would be the three-dimensional equivalent of cycLops-and several hundred times larger, because it would need to be at least a thousand kilometers in diameter. Preferably ten thousand, to get good resolving power at these ultralow frequencies.

“Yet it need contain much less material than cyCLOPS, because it would be built in Deep Space, under weightless conditions. Helmer chose as its location the satellite Mnemosyne, outermost of Saturn’s moons, and it seems a very logical choice. In fact the only choice…

“For Mnemosyne is twenty million kilometers from Saturn, well clear of the planet’s own feeble ionosphere, and also far enough out for its tidal forces to be negligible. But most important of all, it has almost zero rotation. Only a modest amount of rocket power would cancel its spin entirely. Mnemosyne would then be the only body in the universe with no rotation at all, and Helmer suggests that it might be an ideal laboratory for various cosmological experiments.”

“Such as a test of Mach’s principle,” interrupted that confident young voice.

“Yes,” agreed Duncan, now more than ever impressed by his unknown critic.

“That was one possibility he mentioned. But back to Argus … “Mnemosyne would serve as the core or nucleus of the array. Thousands of elements-little more than stiff wires-would radiate from it, like-like the spines of a sea urchin. Thus it could comb the entire sky for signals. And incidentally, the temperature out around Mnemosyne is so low that cheap superconductors could be used, enormously increasing the efficiency of the system.

“I won’t get involved in the details, of switching and phasing that would allow Argus to swing its antenna spines electrically-without moving them physically—so that it could concentrate on any particular region of the sky. All this, and a great deal more, Helmer had worked out in his notes, using techniques evolved with CYCLops and other radio

telescopes. “You may wonder-as I did-how he ever hoped to get such a gigantic project started. He planned a simple demonstration, which he was certain would provide enough evidence to prove his theories.

“He was going to launch two equal, massive weights in exactly opposite directions, each towing a fine wire, several hundred kilometers long. When the wires had been completely deployed, the weights would be jettisoned—and he would have a simple dipole antenna, perhaps a thousand kilometers long. He hoped that he could persuade the Solar Survey to do the experiment, which would be quite cheap, and would certainly produce some results of value. Then he was going to follow it up with more ambitious schemes, shooting wires out at right angles, and so on….

“But I think I’ve said enough to let you judge for yourselves. There’s much more I’ve not had time to transcribe. I hope you can be patient, at least until after the Centennial. For that, as you are well aware, is what I really came for—and I have work to do …. 9”

“Thank you for your moral support, Bob,” said Duncan when he and His

Excellency the Ambassador for Titan had emerged into the bright sunlight of

Virginia Avenue.

“I never said a word. I was completely out of my depth. And I kept hoping that someone would put the question I’m stiff anxious to see answered.”

“What’s that?” Duncan asked suspiciously.

“How did Helmer think he could get away with 09)

“Oh, that,” said Duncan, mildly disappointed; this aspect of the matter seemed so unimportant now. “I think I understand his strategy. Four years ago, when we turned down his project for a simple long wave detecting system-because we couldn’t afford it, and he wouldn’t say what he was really driving at-he decided he’d have to go directly to Earth and convince the top scientists there. That meant acquiring funds, somehow. I’m sure he hoped that he’d be vindicated so quickly

that we’d forget any minor in281 fraction of the exchange laws. It was a gamble, of course, but he felt it so important that he was prepared to take risks.”

“Hmm,” said the Ambassador, obviously not too impressed. “I know that

Helmer was a friend of yours, and I don’t want to speak harshly of him. But wouldn’t it be fair to call him a scientific genius-and a criminal psychopath?”

Rather to his surprise, Duncan found himself bristling at this description.

Yet he had to admit it contained some truth. One of the attributes of the psychopath-a term still popular among laymen, despite three hundred years of professional attempts to eradicate it-was a moral blindness to any interests but his own. Of course, Karl could always produce a very convincing argument that his interests were for the best of all concerned.

The Makenzies, Duncan realized with some embarrassment, were also skilled at this kind of exercise.

“If there were irrational elements in Karl’s behavior, they were at least partly due to a breakdown he had fifteen years ago. But that never affected his scientific judgment; everyone I’ve spoken to agrees that Argus is sound.”

“I don’t doubt it-but why is it important?” -I’d hoped,” said Duncan mildly, “that I’d made that clear to our invisible friends.”

And I believe I have, he told himself, to at least one of them. His most penetrating questioner was certainly one of Terra’s top radio astronomers.

He would understand, and only a few allies at that level were necessary.

Duncan was certain that someday they would meet again, this time eye to eye, and with a pointed lack of reference to any prior encounter.

“As to why it’s important, Bob, I’ll tell you something that I didn’t mention to the Committee, and which I’m sure Karl never considered, because he was too engrossed in his own affairs. Do you realize what a project like

Argus would do to the Titan economy? It would bring us billions and make us the scientific hub of the Solar System. It might even go a long way to solve our financial problems, when the demand for hydrogen

starts to drop in the ‘80’s.” 282 “I appreciate that,” Farrell answered dryly, “especially as my taxes will go toward it. But let nothing interfere with the March of Science.”

Duncan laughed sympathetically. He liked Bob Farrell, and he had been extremely helpful. But he was less and less sure of the Ambassador’s loyalties, and it might soon be time to find a replacement. Unfortunately, it would again have to be a Terran, because of this infernal gravity; but that was a problem Titan would always have to live with.

He could certainly never tell his own ambassador, still less the Argus

Committee, why Karl’s brainchild might be so vital to the human race. There were speculations in that Minisec-luckily, there was no hint of them in the sketchbook-which had best not be published for many years, until the project had proved itself.

Karl had been right so often in the past, seizing on truths beyond all bounds of logic and reason, that Duncan felt sure that this last awesome intuition was also correct. Or if it was not, the truth was even stranger; in any event, it was a truth that must be learned. Though the knowledge might be overwhelming, the price of ignorance could be-extinction.

Here on the streets of this beautiful city, steeped in sunlight and in history, it was hard to take Karl’s final comments seriously, as he speculated about the origin of those mysterious waves. And surely even Karl did not really believe all the thoughts he had spoken into the secret memory of his Minisec, during the long voyage to Earth…. But he was diabolically persuasive, and his arguments had an irresistible logic and momentum of their own. Even if he did not believe all his own conjectures, he might still be right.

“Item one,” he had murmured to himself (it must have been hard to get privacy on that freighter, and Duncan could sometimes bear the noises of the ship, the movements of the other crew members), “these kilohertz waves have a limited range because of interstellar absorption. They would not normally be able to pass from one star to another, unless

plasma clouds act as waveguides, channeling them over greater distances. So their origin must be close to the Solar System.

“My calculations all point to a source-or sources -at about a tenth of a light-year from the Sun. Only a fortieth of the way to Alpha Centauri, but two hundred times the distance of Pluto… No man’s land-the edge of the wilderness between the stars. But that’s exactly where the comets are born, in a great, invisible shell surrounding the Solar System. There’s enough material out there for a trillion of those strange objects, orbiting in a cosmic freezer.

“What’s going on, in those huge clouds of hydrogen and helium and all the other elements? There’s not much energy-but, there may be enough. And where there’s matter and energy-and Time-sooner or later there’s organization.

“Call them Star Beasts. Would they be alive No -that word doesn’t apply.

Let’s just say-“Organized systems.” They’d be hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, and they might live-I mean, maintain their individual identity-for millions of years.

“That’s a thought. The comets that we observe are they the corpses of Star

Beasts, sent sunward for cremation? Or executed criminals? I’m being ridiculously anthropomorphic-but what else can I be?

“And are they intelligent? What does that word mean? Are ants intelligent-are the cells of the human body intelligent? Do all the Star

Beasts surrounding the Solar System make a single entity-and does It know about us? Or does It care?

“Perhaps the Sun keeps them at bay, as in ancient times the campfire kept off the wolves and saber-toothed tigers. But we are already a long way from the Sun, and sooner or later we will meet them. The more we learn, the better.

“And there’s one question I’m almost afraid to think about. Are they gods?

OR ARE THEY EATERS OF GO DST

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Extract from the Congressional Record for 2276 July 4. Address by the

Honorable Duncan Makenzie, Special Assistant to the Chief Administrator,

Republic of Titan.

Mr. Speaker, Members of Congress, Distinguished Guests-let me first express my deep gratitude to the Centennial Committee, whose generosity made possible my visit to Earth and to these United States. I bring greetings to all of you from Titan, largest of Saturn’s many moons-and the most distant world yet occupied by mankind.

Five hundred years ago this land was also a frontier-not only geographically but politically. Your ancestors, less than twenty generations in the past, created the first democratic constitution that really worked-and that still works today, on worlds that they could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.

During these celebrations, many have spoken of the legacy that the founders of the Republic left us on that day, half a thousand years ago. But there have been four Centennials since then; I would like to look briefly at each of them, to see what lessons they have for us.

At the first, in 1876, the United States was still recovering from a disastrous Civil War. Yet it was also laying the foundations of the technological revolution that would soon transform the Earth. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the very year of the first Centennial, this country brought forth the invention which really began the conquest of space.

For in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first practical telephone.

We take electronic communications so utterly for granted that we cannot imagine a society without them; we would be deaf and dumb if these extensions of our senses were suddenly removed. So let us remember that just four hundred years ago, the telephone began the abolition of space -at least upon this planet.

A century later, in 1976, that process had almost finished-and the conquest of interplanetary space was about to begin. By that time, the first man had already reached the Moon, using techniques which today seem unbelievably primitive. Although all historians now agree that the Apollo Project marked the United States’s supreme achievement, and its greatest moment of triumph, it was inspired by political motives that seem ludicrous-indeed, incomprehensible -to our modern minds. And it is no reflection on those first engineers and astronauts that their brilliant pioneering effort was a technological dead end, and that serious space travel did not begin for several decades, with much more advanced vehicles and propulsion systems.

A century later, in 2076, all the tools needed to open up the planets were ready to hand. Longduration life-support systems had been perfected; after the initial disasters, the fusion drive had been tamed. But humanity was exhausted by the effort of global rebuilding following the Time of

Troubles, and in the aftermath of the Population Crash there was little enthusiasm for the colonization of new worlds.

Despite these problems, mankind had set its feet irrevocably on the road to the stars. During the twenty-first century, the Lunar Base became self supporting the Mars Colony was established, and we had secured a bridgehead on Mercury. Venus and the Gas Giants defied us-as indeed they still do but we had visited all the larger moons and asteroids of the Solar

System.

By 2176, just a hundred years ago, a substantial fraction of the human race was no longer Earthborn. For the first time we had the assurance

that whatever happened to the mother world, our cultural heritage 286 would not be lost. It was secure until the death of the Sun-and perhaps beyond…. The century that lies behind us has been one of consolidation, rather than of fresh discovery. I am proud that my world has played a major role in this process, for without the easily accessible hydrogen of the Titanian atmosphere, travel between the planets would still be exorbitantly expensive.

Now the old question arises: Where do we go from here? The stars are as remote as ever; our first probes, after two centuries of travel, have yet to reach Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s closest neighbor. Though our telescopes can now see to the limits of space, no man has yet traveled beyond Pluto. And we have still to set foot on far Persephone, which we could have reached at any time during the last hundred years…. Is it, true, as many have suggested, that the frontier has again closed?

Men have believed that before, and always they have been wrong. We can laugh now at those early4wentieth-century pessimists who lamented that there were no more worlds to discover-at the very moment when Goddard and

Korolev and von Braun were playing with their first primitive rockets. And earlier still, just before Columbus opened the way to this continent, it must have seemed to the peoples of Europe that the future could hold nothing to match the splendors of the past.

I do not believe that we have come to the end of History, and that what lies ahead is only an elaboration and extension of our present powers, on planets already discovered. Yet it cannot be denied that this feeling is now widespread and makes itself apparent in many ways. There is an unhealthy preoccupation with the past, and an attempt to reconstruct or relive it. Not, I hasten to add, that this is always bad -what we are doing now proves that it is not.

We should respect the past, but not worship it. While we look back upon the four Centennials that lie behind us, we should think also of those that will be celebrated in the years to come. What of 2376, 2476… 2776, a full thousand years after the birth of the Republic? How

will the people of those days 287 remember us? We remember the United States chiefly by Apollo; can we bequeath any comparable achievement to the ages ahead?

There are many problems still to be solved, on all the planets.

Unhappiness, disease-even poverty -still exist. We are still far from

Utopia, and we may never achieve it. But we know that all these problems can be solved, with the tools that we already possess. No pioneering, no great discoveries, are necessary here. Now that the worst evils of the past have been eliminated, we can look elsewhere, with a clear conscience, for new tasks to challenge the mind and inspire the spirit. Civilization needs long-range goals. Once, the Solar System provided them, but now we must look beyond. I am not speaking of manned travel to the stars, which may still lie centuries ahead. What I refer to is the quest for intelligence in the universe, which was begun with such high hopes more than three centuries ago-and has not yet succeeded.

You are all familiar with CYCLOPS, the largest radio telescope on Earth.

That was built primarily to search for evidence of advanced civilizations.

It transformed astronomy; but despite many false alarms, it never detected a single intelligent message from the stars. This failure has done much to turn men’s minds inward from the greater universe, to concentrate their energies upon the tiny oasis of the Solar System…. Could it be that we are looking in the wrong place? The wrong place, that is, in the enormously wide spectrum of radiations that travel between the stars.

All our radio telescopes have searched the short waves-centimeters, or at most, meters-in length. But what of the long and ultra long waves-not only kilometers but even mega meters from crest to crest? Radio waves of frequencies so low that they would sound like musical notes in our ears could detect them.

We know that such waves exist, but we have never been able to study them, here on Earth. They are blocked, far out in the fringes of the

Solar Sys term, by tho gale of electrons that blows forever from the Sun. To know what the universe is saying with these vast, slow undulations, we must build radio telescopes of enormous size, beyond the limits of the Sun’s own billion-Hometer-deep ionosphere-that is, at least as far out as the orbit of Saturn. For the first time, this is now possible.

For the first time, there are real incentives for doing so…. We tend to judge the universe by our own physical size and our own time scale; it seems natural for us to work with waves that we could span with our arms, or even with our fingertips. But the cosmos is not built to these dimensions; nor, perhaps, are all the entities that dwell among the stars.

These giant radio waves are more commensurate with the scale of the Milky

Way, and their slow vibrations are a better measure of its eon-long

Galactic Year. They may have much to tell us when we begin to decipher their messages.

How those scientist-statesmen Franklin and Jefferson would have welcomed such a project! They would have grasped its scope, if not its technology for they were interested in every branch of knowledge between heaven and Earth.

The problems they faced, five hundred years ago, will never rise again. The age of conflict between nations is over. But we have other challenges, which may yet tax us to the utmost. Let us be thankful that the universe can always provide great goals beyond ourselves, and enterprises to which we can pledge our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.