Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 12
“But these guys?” Helios asks.
“Their star formed a little too soon. Probably from an earlier generation of stars than the ones that birthed Sol. They’re starved of this stuff. According to these readings, they’re at around ten times the average, so better than nothing, but not much more than nothing. Their ratio is thousands and thousands of times lower than the scarce amount we have on Earth.”
“Interesting,” Sandy says, trying to sound engaged. Dali can see she still doesn’t get the significance of Kari’s discovery, but then, neither does he.
“Oh, it’s more than interesting,” Kari says. “It explains everything! It explains why we don’t see anything in orbit around Bee.”
“What?” Dali says. “How?”
Kari addresses Helios. “Gravity therapy be damned, I’m coming down to the flight deck. We’ve got to run the numbers on Bee again. I think we missed something crucial.”
Contact
“They’re trapped,” Kari says, having come down to the bridge from the torus.
“I don’t understand,” Dali replies. “What do you mean, trapped?”
“How do we get from Earth to space?” Kari asks. “Rockets, right? We use chemical rockets. Only there’s a problem.”
“What’s the problem?” Helios asks, floating beside her within the cockpit.
“You’re talking about the tyranny of rockets?” Sandy says, addressing Kari. She sees the blank look on Dali’s face and explains. “It’s a spaceflight concept. Imagine crossing the US without gas stations or charging points. Imagine if you had to carry all your fuel with you from the start. How far could you go? How many fuel cans would you pile up on your backseat? What would you throw out so you can carry a little extra fuel to get a bit farther down the road?”
“You’d throw out everything you could,” Kari says. She addresses Helios, saying, “Think about every rocket you’ve ever seen. What do they all have in common? They’re huge. Roll up to the Cape and there’s a big old tall rocket with a tiny capsule at the top.”
“Okay,” Helios says, yawning. From what Dali can tell, he’s tired rather than bored, but Kari does not look impressed.
“I don’t see the problem,” Sandy says, “You don’t need uranium for fuel.”
“Don’t you?” Kari says. She cradles her injured arm in front of her even though in weightlessness there’s no gravity acting on it. Dark bruises have formed on her neck. The fingers on her good hand have a purple tinge, but she doesn’t appear to be in pain. She must be drugged up to her eyeballs, but she’s thinking on a level the rest of the crew haven’t reached yet.
Kari says, “Getting to space is easy. It’s only a hundred miles up. Staying in space is hard. Damn hard. It’s not enough to get into space, you have to get into orbit. Eighty to ninety percent of everything you see sitting on the launchpad is fuel. Rockets are basically gigantic fuel tanks with a couple of high-performance engines tacked to the bottom. Launching rockets from Earth is so damn difficult we have to launch in two or three stages. In essence, we’re launching a rocket on top of a rocket on top of yet another rocket that’s already in motion—and that gets something the size of an SUV into orbit.”
Sandy nods, but from her downturned lips, it’s obvious she doesn’t see the significance of Kari’s point. For Sandy, this is spaceflight 101.
“Okay,” Dali says, echoing Helios’ sentiment.
Kari points at the stars. “But Bee is different. Bee’s bigger. Denser. The gravity down there’s stronger. The atmosphere is thicker.”
“Oh,” Sandy says. Her mouth hangs open.
“Yeah,” Kari says, seeing the realization hit. “Chemical rockets like those on the Ranger top out at about five kilometers per second. That’s why we need stages. One stage propels the other. To reach orbit around Earth, we have to travel at about eight kilometers a second—ripping through five miles of open space each and every second to avoid falling back to the planet.”
“But around Bee?” Dali says.
“Around Bee, it’s over fourteen kilometers per second. Given how thick their atmosphere is, that’s well outside what even the best three-stage chemical rocket could reach.”
“Could you make a four-stage rocket?” Dali asks.
“Sure,” Kari says, being sarcastic. “If you want to launch a coke can into space. Maybe.”
Helios says, “So, we’re not seeing anything in orbit around Bee because they can’t escape their own planet?”
“No welcoming committee in orbit, huh?” Sandy says.
“Nope,” Kari says, pointing at an image of the planet on a nearby screen. “They’re stuck. Trapped.”
“Damn,” Dali says. “So it’s not just that they haven’t hit the space age yet, but that they can’t?”
Kari says, “Yes. When we first measured their gravity, I assumed they’d use nuclear rockets to reach orbit. Those can hit around eight kilometers per second. A three-stage nuclear rocket might be able to lift off Bee.”
Dali mumbles, “But there’s no uranium.”
Kari snaps her fingers in agreement. “They may not even know about uranium, or if they do, it might be an oddity. For them, it’ll be some trace element that is far too rare and exotic to ever be of practical importance. They may study it in a lab or something, but they’re not building reactors or weapons with the stuff.”
“Huh,” Dali says.
“Well, that really does change everything,” Sandy says. “They’re locked in.”
“And we’re locked out,” Kari says. “We can’t go down there.”
“But we’re carrying nuclear material,” Dali replies. “Can’t we just make a nuclear rocket or something?”
Helios is amused. He tries not to laugh.
Sandy says, “He’s a cute one, huh?”
“What?” Dali says.
Sandy explains, “We can’t design, test, fabricate and manufacture a bunch of nuclear-powered rocket engines. It’s well beyond the four of us or anyone in cold storage.”
“What about the Falco drive?” Dali asks, suspecting this is yet another dumb question.
“Nah,” Helios says. “That thing is like leading a donkey with a carrot on a stick.”
Dali must look confused as Helios clarifies his comment. “It compresses spacetime in front of us. We’re forever falling toward something that’s not actually there.”
“Its effect is cumulative,” Sandy says. “It’s like an ion drive. It’s great in space but useless at the bottom of a gravity well.”
Kari laughs. “It’s amazing that damn thing works at all. Hell, the first one was made out of cardboard. I’m not kidding! It only generates a few centimeters of acceleration each second. You ain’t getting a Falco to do any heavy-lifting down there on Bee!”
“So there’s no contact?” Dali says, feeling stunned.
“No physical contact,” Kari says. “We can talk to them, but we won’t be shaking hands or tentacles.”
“Well, Bee sucks,” Helios says. “Literally.”
“And you’re sure about this?” Sandy asks.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Kari says. “This changes everything. Our mission is crippled. We can’t accomplish any of the biological goals. Not one of them, goddamn it!”
Dali feels for her. As the astrobiologist on the team, this effectively wipes out 95% of her role.
“We may have another problem,” Dali says, realizing the ripple effect of this news.
Sandy looks at him with alarm. It’s not difficult to see she would have preferred he briefed her in private, but Dali’s still grappling with the implications of the response from Bee. Voicing his concerns in front of the others may help him unravel the mystery.
“Spit it out,” Kari says.
Dali says, “All this is going to slow down First Contact.”
“How?”
“We’re visual. Sight is our primary sense, followed by sound. When two cultures meet on Earth, they learn to speak each other’s language by agreeing on the things around them. I point at trees growing on rocky ground offshore and say, ‘Island.’ A Maori says, ‘Motu,’ and we have agreement. We’ve learned something about each other. But we can only reach that because we have a shared medium—sight.”
“And these guys?” Helios says.
“We know nothing of their physiology,” Kari says. “They could be like dolphins, faxing images between each other using sonar.”
Dali says, “Whatever their primary senses are—we can’t engage with them if we can’t figure that out.”
“So we go slow,” Sandy says. “There’s no rush.”
“It gets worse,” Dali says.
“Worse? How?” Kari asks.
Dali brings up the response from the Beebs on a console.
[ 9 / 3 = 3 ]
“Hey, they replied to your math primer,” Helios says. “That’s great. How is that bad?”
Dali points at the first digit, saying, “I didn’t include the number nine. I deliberately withheld our entire sequence of numbers. I wanted them to be aware something was missing. I was looking to provoke discussion. I wanted to see if they would notice and was curious how they would pose questions back to us.”
“Wait. What?” Kari says.
Helios is more direct. “So you’re saying, they already knew our numeric system.”
Dali nods.
“I’m with Helios. I don’t see why that’s so bad,” Sandy says. “Maybe they figured that out from the countless radio signals Earth has broadcast to the cosmos over the decades.”
“Maybe,” Dali says. “But there’s more to this.”
“Like what?”
“I sent a bunch of simple math examples. They responded within a second using an equation that exceeded anything I sent. Within a second! And then… silence.”
Kari glances at Helios before making the point Dali’s been avoiding.
“They lied, huh?”
He nods.
“Hang on,” Sandy says. “I don’t get it. What are you talking about?”
“They made a mistake,” Dali says, tapping the number nine on the screen. “They responded far too quickly.”
Kari adds, “And somebody realized that and shut things down.”
Dali snaps his fingers. “Exactly.”
“Lies,” Helios says.
“Does someone want to fill me in on this?” Sandy asks.
Helios points at Dali, saying, “Your clever little friend suggested First Contact would be overshadowed by lies.”
Sandy looks sideways at Dali. This is the first she’s heard of his crazy theory.
In his defense, Dali says, “I mean, I thought it was a possibility. Historically, whenever there’s been an imbalance between civilizations, there’s been subterfuge.”
“Lies,” Kari says, clearly not liking Dali’s diluted alternative to that punchy term.
“I don’t see how this is a lie,” Sandy says.
“They’re not telling the truth,” Helios says. “They know more than they’re letting on, and this slipped out.”
“I don’t blame them,” Dali says. “We have an asymmetrical relationship with them. We’re space-faring. They’re locked-in. That inequality puts them at a disadvantage. Lies are a way of leveling the playing field.”
Sandy says, “You make it sound like we’re at war. We’re not. They’re not our enemy. We’re both intelligent species.”
Dali says, “And we’ll both look for anything that’ll give us leverage. You’ve got to remember, for us, this is a voyage of discovery. For them, it’s disruptive.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“They didn’t ask for us to come knocking. They’re unsure of our intentions. They’re powerless to do anything about our approach. For all they know, we’re space pirates.”
“So you think they’re afraid?”
“Cautious. Calculating. We could upset the balance of power on their world. Our arrival could lead to war down there.”
Sandy says, “I think you’re taking this too far.”
“Well,” Kari says, “we are on a warship.”
Dali’s eyes go wide. “Hang on. We’re on a what?”
Sandy says, “The Magellan is a repurposed frigate.”
“Carrying armament,” Kari says, clarifying a point it seems Sandy has deliberately omitted. Given Dali’s the only one that wouldn’t realize this, he feels as though Sandy is being dishonest with him. If anything, it’s probably not personal. She was probably trying to avoid throwing gasoline on the discussion.
“It’s not that unusual,” she says, defending herself. She must see the look of horror on Dali’s face. “Historically, we’ve repurposed warships for exploration. Charles Darwin sailed in the HMS Beagle, which was a Cherokee-class gunship in its day. It was still a voyage of discovery, not conquest.”
“What Sandy’s saying,” Kari replies, “is we don’t want to bomb anyone if we don’t have to.”
Helios laughs.
“No one’s bombing anyone,” Sandy replies, trying to shut down the conversation and get the discussion back on track.
Dali is flabbergasted. “Why would Earth send a warship on a First Contact mission?”
“It’s been refitted specifically for this mission,” Sandy says.
“Bigger budget than NASA,” Kari says. “No one makes spaceships like the military. Besides, they have the best radar and imaging tech on offer.”
Dali stutters. “If—If they realized a warship is heading their way, they’ll panic.”
“They won’t be able to tell,” Sandy says.
Kari twists her head sideways, shrugging a little at that point.
Sandy ignores her, addressing Dali. “You told us they replied within a second. Why is that so important?”
Dali’s head is swinging. He struggles to articulate his thinking.
“Well, to respond within a second with an entirely new calculation implies some kind of artificial intelligence—at least it would if it were coming from us. We got an automated response based on the inputs we provided. But it went further than anything we suggested.”
Sandy says, “And you think that’s a problem?”
“No,” Dali says. “But the subsequent silence suggests they’re not being open with us. They’re not being honest with their capabilities. They’re being coy.”
“They’re lying,” Kari says, once again simplifying his point.
Dali says, “Someone down there realized what happened and shut it down.”
Helios says, “I see where Dali’s going with this—why shut it down, right?”
Dali points at him, “That is the question!”
Sandy says, “Okay. I get it. So you’re saying, if they have this level of advanced tech, why take it offline when it could accelerate our ability to converse with them?”
“Exactly,” Dali says, relieved she could articulate what he only felt in the depths of his soul. “They’re playing dumb.”
Helios says, “And they’re playing dumb because…”
“Because they feel they have something to lose,” Dali says. “That’s the asymmetry—the inequality. We don’t have anything to lose. They do.”
Sandy presses her head against her palm. The complexity of the logic is getting to her. “And what do they have to lose?”
“That’s what we need to figure out,” Dali says. “People lie to manipulate others. The question is—why are they lying to us?”
“So for now?” Helios asks.
“For now, we string them along,” Dali replies. “We make as though we didn’t notice. We continue conversing with them using math as though nothing happened.”
“And we watch,” Kari says. “We watch them like a goddamn hawk.”
Dali says, “I’ve prepared a few more calculations to send. I’ll keep going as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. I suspect this will help them relax. We’ll introduce them to the power sign in math. It’s essential for any scientific discourse. That we’ve continued the discussion should set their minds at ease, but notice there are a few assumptions here.”
[ 2 * 2 = 4 ]
[ 2 ^ 2 = 4 ]
[ 2 * 2 * 2 = 8 ]
[ 2 ^ 3 = 8 ]
[ 3 ^ 2 = 9 ]
[ 3 ^ 3 = 27 ]
“These are new numbers!” Kari says, surprised by their inclusion without any explanation to the Beebs.
“Yes. They’ll see us assuming that we know they know how our numeric system works.”
Sandy sounds frustrated. She says, “What are you trying to accomplish, Dali?”
“I’m looking for information leakage,” he says. “We’re blind to them and their society. We have no idea about their motives. We’ve got to learn indirectly from these interactions.”
“So what are you looking for?” she asks.
“A delayed response. They’re going to play our game. And they’re going to hide theirs. They’re going to make it look like that one-second turn-around was a glitch.”
Helios says, “And if they do that—”
Kari completes his thought. “We’ll know they’re lying.”
Dali smiles, showing his teeth.
On Approach
The next three weeks are spent on approach to Bee.
As the planet orbits Luyten’s Star once every eighteen and a half days, most of that time, the planet is either obscured or eclipsed by the red dwarf. Luyten’s Star might be faint as seen from Earth, but up close, it’s a raging nuclear furnace churning the surface with a dense plasma heated to 3,300K. The star itself rotates only once every 120 days, making Bee’s orbit frantic by comparison. The crew spend their time reviewing the ever-increasing clarity of the various observations made of the planet. Dali, though, is more interested in Bee’s math. Given how much the original Dali hated calculus, Sandy’s told him it’s a surprising twist.
“You still think they’re lying,” Sandy says, climbing into bed beside him. Nights on the Magellan are cool. Not only does it save power, it allows the various life-support systems to go into maintenance mode. Bots undertake preventative repairs quietly throughout the torus and the main body of the craft, preparing for the next day.
“They’re smart,” Dali says. “There’s no doubt about that. We’ve moved on to Lorenz equations.”
