“It’s not a spare, Max,” said Sarah. “I brought the trap here for further analysis.”
“But that’s...”
“Against all safety rules,” interrupted the Director, “and for good reason as that radiation alert demonstrated. We have to make safe the results of this gross misconduct, and then you all wait for the next shuttle home.”
Sarah’s shoulders slumped. Not only had she failed to solve the mystery of what lay in the trap, she had failed to protect Max from her own mistakes. “He’s done nothing wrong!”
“He chose you as a supervisor,” said the Director. “That was enough. Now, get rid of whatever’s inside that machine.”
Petra and Sarah looked blankly at each other. “Get rid of it?”
“Out of this base, off the Moon, and as far away as possible. If you don’t have any better ideas I’ll happily launch it on a transfer rocket programmed to self-destruct beyond the orbit of Mars. And I’ll take the cost out of your unemployment pay for the next decade, because you’ll both be unemployable by the time I finish with you.”
Sarah and Petra looked at each other. They’d focused on studying the particle and hadn’t thought what might happen next. Petra moved towards the equipment. “We should do a last scan then.”
“No,” ordered the Director. “Neither of you get to operate any equipment. My engineers do that, and vet your instructions first.”
One of the engineers stepped up to the console. “What are these scans, and how will they help get rid of this thing?”
Sarah looked at Petra, then explained. “We’ve been using high energy electron beams. The object in the trap is an exotic cosmic ray particle. We’re not sure what it might be and were looking at its structure.”
“And how will these scans help remove it?” asked the Director.
“Knowledge always helps,” said Sarah, knowing how unconvincing she sounded.
Petra came to the rescue. “We need to know if it has changed so we can tune whatever action we take to its current state, rather than what we had previously measured.”
The engineer nodded. “That makes sense.”
With evident reluctance, the Director gave his permission.
Soon the results arrived. The mysterious chunk of nuclear matter in the trap was more massive than before and had a slightly larger electric charge.
“What does the growth mean?” said Sarah. “Is it a strangelet after all?” She was glad only Petra seemed to know what such a particle was.
“It is not runaway growth. Your weed-whacker scenario is not appropriate,” said Petra.
Sarah relaxed a little – at least she hadn’t caused the end of the world. “How do we get rid of it?”
Petra shrugged.
“That should be straight forward enough,” said Max, as he looked at the results.
“Explain,” said the Director.
“It’s charged. It’s easily accelerated if you drop it through an electric field.” He thought for a few moments. “Getting it to lunar escape velocity should be trivial. Solar System escape should also be easy.” He jotted a few numbers on a tablet and passed it to Sarah, only to have the Director intercept it and pass the device to his engineer.
“Will that work?” he asked.
After a few moments the engineer nodded. “The difficulty will be getting it out of the trap, but even that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”
“Do you need them here for that?” The Director indicated Petra and Sarah. The engineer shook his head. The Director turned to them. “Leave. You’re confined to the common areas. Your access to all experimental facilities rescinded. The cosmic ray collector will have to be safely turned off as well, but that can come later.” Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again, knowing she didn’t have a leg to stand on.
She stood and turned to leave the room. Max and Petra followed her example.
“Not you, young man. You can assist here, then help us shut down the collector.” The Director then turned to Sarah and Petra. “The two of you have until the next shuttle in three weeks to persuade me I shouldn’t have you fired and charged with gross negligence.”
It didn’t take Max and the safety team long to set up an electromagnetic launcher for the tiny particle. Their main difficulty had been plumbing the beamline of the small accelerator to one of the external vents in the lab, so that the particle could leave the vacuum of the cold trap for the vacuum of space. The long, straight metal tube that facilitated this looked incongruous, like a smoke stack on a jet engine.
“Is it ready yet?” demanded the Director, who had hovered nearby throughout the construction process.
“All ready,” said Max. The engineer standing next to him nodded in confirmation.
“So what are we waiting for?”
“Is the gun charged up?” asked Max.
“Ten megavolts and holding steady,” said the engineer.
Max’s finger hovered above the large red button that would release the trap’s vent, and nudge the particle into the accelerator.
“Are you sure we want to do this? Sarah must have thought it was important.”
“Your loyalty to your supervisor does you credit, son,” said the Director, “but delaying any longer will only demonstrate you’re a dangerous, head in the clouds fool like her.”
Max thought for a moment, then pressed the button.
There was no climax, no noise, no lights.
“Is it gone?”
“Yes, Director,” said Max. “It’s gone.”
“Where to?”
Max gestured helplessly upwards. “Out there,” he said. “Where it came from, well away from any solid bodies in the Solar System, as you instructed.”
The Director nodded to himself. “Good riddance.”
“Was it one of these ‘weed-whacking’ strangelets?” asked the Director.
Three weeks had passed. The shuttle would leave in a day, and Petra and Sarah were delivering their report. They had spent the intervening time working on the data, and developing computer models of what Sarah had found. Given what they now knew, they were confident they could turn this disaster into a massive success.
“No,” said Petra. “At least, not directed at us.”
The Director frowned. “Explain.”
“Have you actually read our report?” asked Sarah.
The Director shrugged, just a little twitch of his shoulders. “I’m sure it will just be an attempt at justifying the unjustifiable.”
“Then why bother with this meeting?”
“For the record. In cases like this there has to be a review, and that’s what we’re having. I mostly want to know exactly how much of a risk you took with all our lives. Now, will you answer my question?”
Petra continued. “The thing in the cold trap took no notice of anything we did, just cycled through a series of structural transformations.”
“A maintenance cycle,” added Sarah.
“A ticking time bomb?” said the Director.
“No. We eliminated that possibility,” said Sarah. “That’s on page four of the report.”
He ignored Sarah’s dig. “What triggered the radiation?”
“The arrival of a weak solar storm,” said Petra.
“The collectors recorded a burst of moderate energy protons and higher mass nuclei coming from the Sun,” said Sarah.
“A small coronal mass ejection, as predicted,” said Petra.
“Some of those particles, possibly carbon or nitrogen nuclei, hit our sample. They were transformed.”
“Eaten,” said the Director. He looked pleased at this possibility.
“No,” said Petra.
“Nothing like that,” added Sarah.
“Then what?”
“Using the data collected before you ejected it, we modelled the... device,” said Petra. “It is amazing. If hit by a heavy nucleus, or protons above a certain energy, they become part of it. Gamma rays, pions, radioactive secondaries res
ult. They triggered the alarm.”
“In other words, dangerous,” said the Director.
“But, and this is where it gets clever, it absorbs only a few nucleons at a time,” said Petra.
“However,” said Sarah, “given a huge supply of nucleons – which would only happen if it hit a neutron star – something very different happens.”
“A phase change takes place,” said Petra. “To something much more complex, and much more useful.”
“It turns out,” said Sarah, “this thing is a terraforming device for neutron stars.”
“What?” The Director clearly hadn’t been expecting that.
“It takes neutron star matter,” said Petra, “and turns it into computational substrate, something hugely powerful, ready to run any code you want.”
The Director looked at the two women in confusion, not sure if they were mad, tricking him, or somehow had turned the tables. Sarah was surprised he had been so careless and overconfident to not read the report. If he had, he would have been ready for this, had a response planned.
“You’re saying this thing is a machine?”
They nodded.
“Made by some kind of intelligence – extraterrestrial intelligence?”
They nodded again.
“It’s a colonisation tool.” He looked a little panicked. “We’re being invaded and you brought it into my Moonbase?” His face was getting redder, his voice louder.
“It was never a hazard to us,” said Petra. “It’s for a kind of life we didn’t think possible, an environment utterly alien. They do not care, or realise, we exist.”
“It came from a neutron star,” said Sarah, “designed to affect other neutron stars. The intelligences responsible operate at densities millions of times greater than us. Everything in the Solar System, except maybe the very centre of the Sun, would just be overdense vacuum to them. But they’re turning entire collapsed stars into computronium – neutronic computronium.”
“The singularity happened,” said Petra, “a long time ago, and a long way away.”
“We have a lot of catching up to do,” said Sarah.
The Director looked away from them for a moment, tapping his finger on his desk. “You’re sure of this, certain these results will stand up to the harshest scrutiny?” They nodded. “You think that will protect you from the consequences of your actions?”
“This is the discovery of the century, Director,” said Sarah. “The millennium.”
“Where’s the proof? This particle of yours is gone, the data only on our servers, which can fail. Without that, the two of you will sound like embittered cranks, making things up to get your jobs back.”
“Until someone else finds one,” said Sarah. “They must be pretty common. We caught ours in the first hours of collector operation.”
“In which case it’s someone else’s discovery. Science moves on, you get left behind.”
“Frankly, I don’t care,” said Sarah. “It would be nice to get the credit, I’ll admit, so we have backups and we’ve sent an encrypted dataset to Horst and other press contacts. But if all that fails, the science will happen, even if I have to drop a few hints to the Americans in Moonbase Five. The science is the thing. And when the result gets out, you’ll look an utter fool.”
The Director leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk, and looked directly into Sarah’s eyes. “You took unacceptable risks.”
“Yes, we – I – did. But it was the right thing to do.”
“You didn’t know that. There have to be consequences.”
Sarah paused for a moment, sensing something had changed. “Are we negotiating?” she asked.
The Director nodded. “Yes. You’ve made a valuable discovery, but used unacceptable methods. There’s no place for you on the Moon anymore, but we might still salvage something. You want the science out. I want full credit for Moonbase Three and don’t want either of you going to the Americans or elsewhere. So, what do we do?”
“I publish the paper, this place gets the credit,” said Sarah.
The Director shook his head. “That would encourage everyone else to take stupid risks, disregard the rules and ignore procedure. I have a counter proposal.”
Sarah sighed. “I’ve had enough. This is no way to do science.” She rose in her chair, but Petra reached out, laying a hand on her wrist.
“Wait – hear him out.”
Something in Petra’s expression caused her to pause, to doubt her position was as strong as she thought. A man like this didn’t get to be a Moonbase Director without influence in many high places. Perhaps it would be better to have him on her side.
“Go on,” she muttered.
“Given what you did, neither of you can get full credit. Some, perhaps, is due. It is an amazing and fundamental result. But too many people know what you did, and that cannot be forgiven. You can’t just stay here and carry on. Let me propose this. Max leads the paper, gets credit for the result and gets the science out. Moonbase Three, and yourselves, bask in reflected glory. Max takes over the experiment, the two of you head home, a black mark on your lunar records, but your status secure as collaborators on this fine result.”
“But...” muttered Sarah.
“Nobody wins,” concluded the Director, “but nobody loses. And if you still think the encrypted archive you sent Horst will help,” he waved a datachip at them, “he sent it back to me, and deleted his copy without distributing it. Who exactly do you think he works for?”
Sarah and Petra nodded, defeated.
But this isn’t science, thought Sarah. This is someone who left science long ago playing a game. He played it well, but it meant nothing. The result, whoever got the credit, was the thing. It made a difference. It would change the world, change what people knew and thought about the world and the universe at large. That was the important thing. In the future, this result would be remembered. Long after all their names were forgotten, along with all the petty squabbles over who had found what and where, the result would remain.
They might be unknowably distant, and incomprehensibly alien, but humanity was no longer alone in the universe.
The Big Next
Pat Cadigan
“I am not going to tell you my name, not yet... [said Treebeard]... it would take a very long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time, so my name is like a story... in the Old Entish... it is a lovely language but it takes a long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything... unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”
“My Aunt Loretta and I used to walk around the lake here when I was your age,” I told Cora, who was hopping along beside me on one leg, her braids flailing in time with the arms of the sweater tied around her waist. On this partly-cloudy Saturday morning, my seven-year-old was conducting an experiment to see which leg could go the greater distance. So far, the right leg had held out from the edge of the parking area, past the picnic tables, and onto the lakeside path. Quite a respectable distance; the left leg was going to have its work cut out. Now I put myself between her and the water so that, in the event of the right leg’s sudden catastrophic failure, she wouldn’t tumble in.
“Mom, you’re blocking my view,” she complained breathlessly. “I can’t see the lake.”
“Sorry about that.” I paused on the dirt path; Cora stopped with me, had trouble balancing, and tried to hop up and down in place but her hopping leg was approaching the limit of its endurance. I put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. “How about you suspend the experiment for the time being and just walk? Then you can be on the side nearest the water and I won’t worry about you accidentally launching yourself into the bullrushes.”
Cora frowned for a moment. “Oh, you mean the cattails. Okay.” She winced as she straightened her left leg, which she’d been holding tightly folded. “Can I have my pad and pen?”
Obediently I produced both items from my jacket pocket and waited whil
e she went down on one knee, using the other as a desk. The memo-book was new – she had filled two others with various observations and conclusions, using her treasured Souvenir of Lake Winnipesaukee ballpoint, a gift from her grandmother last summer. Since then Cora had mounted a campaign for us to go there ourselves so that she could return the favour. It was very light at first, a few mentions casually worked into conversation – Do you think there’ll be ice skating at Coggshall Park this winter? Hey, does Lake Winnipesaukee ever freeze over? She stepped it up as the snow melted and the weather grew warmer: Did you know that Lake Winnipesaukee is seventy-two square miles? Are there any lakes that big in Massachusetts? Have you ever rented a boat? Did you know you can rent one at Lake Winnipesaukee?
Finally she pulled out the big guns: I have to do a report on a historical place and I chose Lake Winnipesaukee. Did you know that a Native American tribe called the Winnepiseogees lived there? As it turned out, she was supposed to have chosen a Massachusetts location; instead of giving her an F, the teacher had sent her to the library to complete a make-up report by the end of the day. The resulting C+ had been my brilliant daughter’s first C ever. I didn’t berate her – my own record was full of Cs and worse – but the shock of not being an A-lister, so to speak, was enough to shut down the Winnipesaukee campaign for a week.
“All done,” she said, standing up and holding out the memo-book with the pen clipped to the cover.
“May I look?” I asked.
“Sure.” She found the right page for me. “There.”
My eyebrows went up at the figure. “That many exactly?”
She nodded. “It’s a lot, huh?”
“And you’re sure it was –” I checked the page. “Exactly one hundred and thirty-eight hops?” Cora nodded again. “You were able to keep track even while we were talking?”
“Well, yeah.” Cora looked surprised at the question. “It’s not hard.”
“I don’t think I could do it,” I said, and then wondered how wise it was for a parent to admit something like that, especially to a seven-year-old.
Cora, however, wasn’t convinced of my deficit. “Have you ever tried? Why not?”
Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox Page 4