Second Contact, page 40
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Dan, for his part, was busy on his computer looking for named stars which, when viewed from Earth, fell within the relatively small zone revealed on the alien plaque. He had barely taken his eyes off it during the drive back from Salida and he had barely spoken a word to anyone since getting it down into his basement.
The few words he did speak were to Alessandro Bonucci, who had been entrusted with detailed photographs of the plaque and who was already remotely controlling powerful telescopes housed at some of Timo’s isolated and well-positioned facilities around the world.
While Dan was poring through lists of stars already known to be orbited by other exoplanets, Alessandro was stepping up the detection process. He and countless other astronomers had publicly stated on several occasions that one of the greatest obstacles to detecting exoplanets or alien signals was, quite obviously, knowing where to look for them. With a specific target now in hand, he was able to point much of the world’s most expensive and most advanced deep-space observation equipment towards an area of the sky which both he and Dan McCarthy now believed to house New Kerguelen’s home system.
Observation would hold the answers, but one step was necessary before they could pursue off-Earth observation of New Kerguelen and ultimately justify the focused development of the technologies needed to reach the distant world: before any of that could come to pass, they had to prove it was there. The plaque’s map was one thing, but direct and replicable observation was something else. Dan wasn’t concerned that Alessandro hadn’t reported any findings just yet, since hardly any time had passed.
President Slater’s televised words had gone in one of Dan’s ears and straight out the other, as had Timo’s reasonable suggestion that she might have been informed that the Messengers had briefly flown over Montana in the moments after the widely observed satellite burn-up.
“Dan,” Clark called, finally getting his attention. “What do you think?”
He looked over and saw a series of confused faces, some of their expressions bordering on concern. “Uh, what do I think about what?”
Emma walked over to Dan and sat in the chair next to him before succinctly recapping Slater’s key points.
“What I think about that is that she doesn’t know about this,” he replied after hearing it all out, more relaxed than anyone else. “If the Messengers were spotted by anyone else, they wanted to be. They don’t make mistakes. They wanted us to find the plaque first, and we did. But see, that’s the thing: they wanted there to be a plaque. They could have just told me where to look for New Kerguelen, or made me draw this star map like they made me draw the roadmap to Lolo. Remember? In the cornfield? And they wanted there to be a plaque because they want everyone to know this came from them. This way, there’s no debate… there’s no one saying I’m crazy or an attention-seeking publicity hound or anything else like that. I don’t know why we had to find it first and I don’t know why they didn’t just leave it at Walker’s place when they took him — that way we would have had it without needing to get the Feathers involved — but what I know for sure is that the Messengers don’t do things for no reason and they don’t make mistakes.”
“It could be a trail of credibility or something like that,” Tara said.
Dan nodded. “Maybe. We don’t know, but they do. That’s what counts.”
Timo, still partly running on Italian time, found himself gazing at Dan’s bed as Slater’s face left the screen and the Blitz News analysis team took her place. “So, as for tonight, should I call a driver at the hotel, or…”
“No need,” Emma answered.
“Oh really?” Clark interjected, a boyish lilt in his voice. “So where will Dan be spending the evening?”
Tara tried not to laugh.
“Give us a break, man,” Dan said. “Things are complicated enough. Just… dial down on the Clark, okay?”
Emma gently squeezed Dan’s hand, despite the others’ attention rather than because of it. “This isn’t complicated,” she told him, looking into his eyes before turning to Clark. “But yeah, dial down on the Clark, Clark. We’re not in middle school.”
Clark chuckled dryly at having his own words of several days earlier fired back in the opposite direction. He then turned more serious as he looked at them; it was an awkward kind of seriousness, and one he wasn’t at all used to. “And, uh, obviously I care about both of you a lot,” he said, his voice less resonant and sure of itself than normal. “So just, you know, be careful not to get hurt or whatever.”
They knew what he meant and understood the sentiment behind his words, as inarticulate as the words themselves may have been.
“And Emma, be careful,” Tara added with a wink, greatly elongating the word “careful” for the sake of light-hearted emphasis. “Because, you know, at your age…”
“Thirty-two?” Emma said, rolling her eyes at Tara’s attempt at humour.
Tara held a finger to her lips and whispered: “People can hear you.”
A hint of a grin appeared on Emma’s face, despite her best efforts not to let Tara know that her joke had landed a hit. “Anyway… we’ve all had a long day. A long week.”
Clark stood up, able to do so without too much pain as his injuries from the previous night continued to fade. He struggled to believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since he ran into the Messengers’ forcefield, and Emma’s mention of a “long day” was putting it lightly to say the least.
“It’s so weird going to bed knowing that we found what we were looking for,” Tara said. “Like… what do we do now?”
“Sleep?” Clark suggested.
“Good plan,” she replied, heading for the stairs while Dan, as exhausted as anyone else, once again disabled the basement’s access controls for Timo’s benefit before powering down his computer and picking up the plaque to keep it safely by his side.
“Alessandro might call this phone if he has any status updates,” Timo said. “Should I answer it?”
“Yeah, if it’s him,” Dan said. “No one else should call — hardly anyone even has the number — but if they do, don’t pick up. Call me and I’ll come over.”
“What if I see anything important on TV?” Clark asked. “Do you want me to call you, too?”
Dan shrugged. “If by important you mean something we actually need to act on, then yeah; obviously. But not if it’s just the usual crap on the news.”
“Nothing much will happen tonight,” Emma predicted. “Alessandro is doing his thing and Slater’s sideshow is probably going to kick off in the meantime, with everyone talking about what she might know about Contact. But that’s what it’ll be for now: talk. Alessandro sounded pretty confident that he would have something quite soon, so I don’t think there’s going to be time for any major trouble to get going before he does. I think the worst is over.”
“Oh, definitely,” Dan stressed, climbing the stairs. “I’d even say that all of the bad stuff is over, not just the worst of it. Well, maybe except for some neck pains if or when the Messengers ever finally feel like showing up for real.”
Emma laughed.
“I wasn’t joking,” Dan said, lowering his voice. “I still think they’re coming back.”
C minus 1
Cavalieri Observatory
Trento, Italy
When his classmates had dreamed of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup final, Alessandro Bonucci had dreamed of a night like this. The discovery of any exoplanet had seemed unlikely in those days, but a discovery like the one that was now within his grasp — the discovery of a planet which was either the current home to intelligent extraterrestrials or a hand-picked second home for humanity — well, a discovery like that had been beyond his wildest dreams.
Timo Fiore trusted Alessandro more than anyone else, and Alessandro didn’t take this trust lightly. He followed every protocol and every instruction to the letter, ensuring that other workers who had to know he was up to something wouldn’t know what that something was.
Alessandro knew what he was looking for and he knew why it had to be kept quiet for now.
Observable confirmation of New Kerguelen’s existence and location was the jackpot, but Alessandro didn’t dismiss the possibility that what he might come across was a new kind of message in the form of a signal. For that reason, he keenly directed all manner of telescopes at the target zone and pored over the incoming data like a day trader analysing fifteen screens at once.
Even the radio telescopes at his home facility were involved in the search for something meaningful in the target zone, along with faraway telescopes designed for deep-space observation for planetary defence purposes and of course those housed in Timo’s several exoplanet-hunting facilities around the world.
Despite all of this data being fed directly to Alessandro, for many hours there was nothing of note.
Nothing, nothing, and a whole lot more nothing.
But then, suddenly, there was something.
A pop-up window containing a barrage of new data fields flashed up on one of the screens, immediately capturing his full attention. He wheeled his chair down the long line of screens until he was directly in line with the pop-up, at which point his eyes took in the incredible data.
“Oh my God…” Alessandro said out loud. He quickly moved to another screen which relayed data from the same kind of telescope at a different facility and typed in a series of commands to direct the second telescope to the precise focus of the first.
He waited, waited, and waited some more, obsessively rechecking the first screen and fidgeting impatiently until a familiar pop-up appeared on the second.
And there it was.
The observations were distinct and the result was replicable, no two ways about it.
But beyond merely reporting that two telescopes had found the same distant thing, the two screens contained identical data as to its precise nature and meaning.
“No,” Alessandro said, speaking out loud as the reality of what he was looking at slowly sank in. “No way…”
The words and numbers before Alessandro’s eyes were not the kind he had dreamed of. Instead, these observations and the meaning of this find were the stuff of nightmares.
His head fell into his hands.
“No no no no no…”
Part 6
Il Diavolo
“All truths are easy to understand
once they are discovered;
the point is to discover them.”
Galileo Galilei
FRIDAY
C minus 0
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Some time between four and five in the morning, Dan was abruptly awoken by the sound of his phone vibrating its way across Emma’s bedside table.
He tried to reach it before it woke her, too — she was exhausted — but it fell to the floor before he got there.
“Who the hell is that?” she groaned.
Dan picked up his phone, glad to see the screen in one piece, and saw Timo’s name. “It’s Timo,” he said, swiping his finger to take the call.
“You’re awake,” Timo said. “Good; I need to tell you something important. I’m outside.”
Dan flicked the switch on an overhanging wall lamp and pointed to Emma’s bedroom door, silently telling her that Timo was outside. They both stood up.
“Is everything okay?” Dan asked.
Timo hesitated for long enough to render a verbal answer unnecessary. He eventually replied with a simple “No”, but Dan reached the front door to let him in before any elaboration came.
Rooster, doubtless confused as to why everyone was awake so early, lazily watched on.
Having thrown on a satin robe, Emma had already taken an impatient seat on the couch to hear what was so important at this hour. But although no one looked their sharpest, she rose to her feet immediately when she saw the paleness of Timo’s face. Her impatience dissipated in an instant, replaced by palpable apprehension.
“Is someone dead?” Dan asked. Given Timo’s expression and pallor, this was a reasonable enough question.
Timo stepped inside and briefly closed his eyes and gulped several times as though fighting vertigo. He then inhaled slowly but deeply and took a seat on the now empty couch.
Dan and Emma shared an uneasy glance as Timo leaned back and looked upwards.
“Alessandro found a comet,” he eventually said, speaking the words to the ceiling. “To be precise: a previously undetected, multi-kilometre, long-period comet.”
“How far away?” Dan asked. “When’s the next pass? How close will it come?”
Timo looked down from the ceiling and met Dan’s eyes. He said nothing.
“How close?” Dan repeated. “What kind of effects are we looking at? Is this something we can observe or is this something we need to worry about?”
From where Emma was standing, Timo’s manner had already answered Dan’s second question better than any words could. And still, words eluded Timo.
“Timo!” Dan snapped, sharpening his tone rather than raising his voice.
Timo nodded several times — almost rocking rather than nodding — then finally spoke again: “If it’s left to approach unchecked, the destructive effects will be unprecedented. You asked how close it will pass. The answer from Alessandro is that it won’t.”
Now, it was Dan’s turn to fall silent. Now, it was Dan’s turn to turn pale.
“And not just Alessandro,” Timo continued. “Unfortunately, my staff are insistent that if this comet is left unchecked, there will be no passage at all. In Alessandro’s words: after multiple distinct observations, our computers, the best in the world, have calculated the impact probability as ‘effectively one hundred percent’.”
“The data is wrong,” Dan said, his voice weak. “Tell them to check again. Are they factoring in—”
“They’re factoring in everything,” Timo butted in. He took no pleasure in interrupting, but he saw no sense in allowing false hope to develop. “The models have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years and those models are unanimous.”
Dan turned away, as though burned by the heat of a fire.
Emma took over. “So when you say ‘long-period’, what exactly does that mean? The time it takes to loop around the sun?”
“Exactly,” Timo said, slightly more at ease now that he had spat out the basics of the horrible discovery. “It means it takes a long time to orbit the sun. In standard usage, ‘long’ means anything over 200 years. For some comets, it can reach millions of years.”
“So what about this one? How long does this one take?” Emma asked.
“The current estimate is an orbital period of 90,000 years… something in that range.”
Emma perked up. “Estimate? In that range? So none of this is definite?”
“The important parts are definite,” Timo replied, shaking his head gloomily. “Given the distances and timescales involved, even extended observation won’t give an exact orbital period. But we know where it is, we know where it’s going, and we know how fast it’s moving.”
“So how long do we have?” she asked.
Dan turned around to face Timo again. “And how long do we need to do something about it?” he added. “Because there must be options… maybe something bigger and stronger than DS-1, or even any of the speculative technologies other people talked about last year when some people thought the first plaques were warning us about an asteroid. Anything. Bearing in mind that the whole world will be working on this, that money will be no object, and that we won’t be wasting time on safety checks or testing… how long would you say we need to have a chance?”
“Well,” Timo sighed, blowing air from his lips. “Knowing what I know about the status of the kind of projects you mentioned, and being realistic rather than optimistic… I would say that to develop anything capable of dealing with something of this size, we would need around three years if everything went smoothly. But the problem we face is—”
“And how long do we have?” Emma repeated. “Unchecked, when would it hit?”
Timo’s voice fell to a whisper as he delivered the most painful blow of all: “Nine months.”
impact
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Nine months?” Dan said, speaking breathily in disbelief. “Months?”
Timo nodded; it was the nod of a defeated man.
“Two questions,” Emma said. “One: is this data absolutely infallible? And two: how many people know about it?”
“The data becomes firmer with every passing minute,” Timo said. “But Alessandro is a man of science and the words he chose to convey the impact probability, even at this early stage, were ‘effectively one hundred percent’. As for your second question, at this point I’d say the number is probably around ten.”
“Probably?” she parroted. “And probably around ten? So by the time you wake me up, the horse has already bolted?”
“Emma, I just found out! These people are astronomers, not politicians. And one observer can be wrong. Multiple observers at one facility can be wrong. Alessandro showed this to his colleagues — people you’ve met — and when they told him he wasn’t crazy, they asked staff at some of our other facilities to perform their own observations and analysis. Only then, when it became decisive, did he bring this to me. But politicians or not, everyone who works in my facilities understands the importance of a delicate touch here. The news won’t have left those facilities. Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Dan echoed. “Exactly. This isn’t the kind of thing we could keep secret if we wanted to, and it’s not the kind of thing we should try to keep secret.”
