The fourth image was the Earth.
Tim had joined me, and we watched in awe as cloud-speckled sea appeared. Line by line, a land mass took shape beneath it.
'It could be North Africa, but not quite right,' said Tim.
'You're right, but the Med is making an incursion in towards the Sahara,' I said.
'Oh, yes.'
'That makes it extremely old. Need to check.'
'Wait a minute, Eve. What's that at bottom left?'
Off the west coast of the continent of Africa was another land mass. We waited with bated breath for the image to continue.
'Surely, it can't be what it looks like,' I said.
'Good God,' said Tim, 'It must be! It's South America.'
'You're right. The continents are only just starting to move apart,' I said, almost in shock.
This image wasn't from a few thousand years ago, but tens of millions of years ago.
'I'll need to check, Tim, but if my rudimentary knowledge of continental drift can be relied upon, we're looking at Earth as it was around one hundred million years ago.'
'Dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.'
'Yes, we missed our aliens' visit because they passed us by when our ancestors were no larger than dormice and still laid eggs,' I said, in complete awe of the incredible image.
We both sat back in our seats.
'I think it’s around a hundred million years ago,' I reiterated, as memories returned from a planetary history lecture I’d once attended.
'Yes, maybe more.'
'We need a pet geologist.'
'I'll get onto it, Eve,' said Tim, and he left my office.
This changed everything. I asked Janet to set up for me to speak to the Prime Minister. This information might add weight to my opinion that the government should change the level of secrecy to gradual drip-feed releases. What would his opinion be?
If we held this news from the public too long, it would come back to bite us later. How could I convince him? The age of the device would help me build a case.
I examined the picture of Mars anew. How wonderful to have an image of this now almost dead planet with water and clouds. I zoomed in further. The patches of green expanded to fill the screen. Life on Mars. Amazing. The seas were small though, more like large lakes. Mars was probably already losing its water and atmosphere.
I had more conversations with Reg and Hans, as well as the NASA equivalent to my department. We were all astounded by the object's age. Fortunately, when it was hit by the meteor or whatever it was, enough of its automated systems remained to allow it to maintain orbit, otherwise we might never have known we'd been visited.
A few minutes later my internal phone rang.
'Slater.'
'John here, Doctor Slater. We've got language.'
'In the data?'
'Yes, as with the images, there are packets of data which seem to be combinations of code. That indicates language.'
'Have you sent it through to the language boys?'
'Yes, Doctor Slater, five minutes ago.'
'Excellent. Any more images?'
'Not in cylinder one or two. We're now on cylinder three. I'll keep you posted.'
I put a quick call through to the language lab and gave them some encouragement. Trying to work out a language would be a hard task. They’d have to discover the alphabet and put meaning to the constructs. I wouldn't know where to start, but appreciated these guys were geniuses.
Janet brought me a coffee and I showed her the images of Earth and Mars.
'Wow,' she said, which seemed to be her stock response for most of the revelations we were discovering. No news seemed to surprise or shock her. I was sure if I told her we'd found Elvis alive on the moon, she'd still say "Wow!" Her simple acceptance of the miraculous was most refreshing.
She continued, almost adding to the surreality of the situation, 'The Prime Minister will be calling in about ten minutes.'
'Thanks, Janet.' I tried to relax with my coffee while I toyed with good arguments to put to the Prime Minister without sounding as if I was badgering him. It might be best to not even mention reducing security, only to ensure they knew the implications of the object's age. They were the politicians and would understand an ancient device was no immediate threat.
I left the picture of Earth from orbit on the big screen. It was so clear and, having seen Africa myself from the ISS many times, it was amazing this was the view I’d have had around one hundred million years previously. Particularly beautiful was the plume of an ancient volcano just to the west of Uganda, stretching all of the way to Sudan, with its shadow mirroring it on the eastern landscape.
My desk monitor sprang to life with Janet on the screen.
'The Prime Minister, Doctor Slater,' she said.
Briefly his private secretary appeared and said, 'Connecting you.'
Mr Clarke looked up from some papers. In the corner of the screen was an image of my head and shoulders. The opposite corner had "ENCRYPTED" in white letters.
'Dame Evelyn, lovely to hear from you.'
'Thank you, Prime Minister.'
'What would you like to discuss? It sounded important.' Would I be calling him if it wasn't important? I mentally scolded myself. He was only being friendly.
'Have you been following my emails, sir?'
'Yes, avidly.'
'Well, the small cylinders do contain data. So far, we have over two hundred terabytes of unintelligible binary from one cylinder, but the second one has been more interesting. Among similar streams of data, the team has found some images coded to base-eight and some packets of data which behave exactly as you would expect from a language. The images are extraordinary. Image one should be on your screen now. It shows a star field.'
'Yes, got it.'
'It's a small section of the constellation of Leo the Lion. The yellowish star is Sol, our sun, so this is their view of our sun in the constellation of Leo.
'I see. Insignificant, aren't we?'
'I suppose so, sir. From the image, we can calculate where they were viewing us from and I might have identified the star. Jodrell are checking my figures as we speak, but if I am correct, they are seventy lightyears away from us in the direction of Aquarius, though even that might only have been a staging post. It means this image was taken en route by AD1, because Sol would have appeared a lot smaller from a full seventy light years.'
'I see,' he said again, and I noticed he was concentrating on his second monitor where the images were being displayed.
'The next image, Prime Minister, is the moon, and the third is Venus. I'm showing them in the order they were deciphered by our hackers. Neither of those images tell us much, but images four and five are revolutionary,' I flicked my thimball and the image of Mars winged its way to London to appear on his screen.
'What’s this?'
'That, Prime Minister, is Mars.'
'But there are clouds and water... and do I see vegetation?'
'Yes, yes, and yes, sir,' I said excitedly. 'This photograph is a very old image of Mars. We’d not be able to guess how old if we hadn't also had the fifth image,' and I transferred it to him.
'Africa,' he said flatly.
'Yes, Prime Minister, but at the top of the screen, notice the Mediterranean making an incursion into the Sahara, which itself is surprisingly fertile. More important, and this is what helps us date the image and the age of the alien craft, is the land mass to the west of Africa at the bottom left of the image. That, sir, is South America. I'm awaiting confirmation, but I’m pretty sure the image was taken over one hundred million years ago.' I let the news sink in and watched him concentrating on it, repeatedly putting on and removing his glasses.
'Continental drift?'
'Yes, sir. This image was taken when what few mammals there were, still laid eggs. Before the first bees and thirty million years before the first placental mammals. The dinosaurs would still be r
uling the Earth for thirty to forty million years. AD1 is extremely ancient.' I sat back in my seat to allow him to take stock of what I'd told him.
'This is incredible.'
'And not a NASA hoax, sir.'
'No. Quite!' I was pleased to see him chuckle. He’d seen the funny side of my comment.
'Prime Minister, we need to continue to analyse the incoming data for another couple of weeks, but I'm afraid we really should be talking to many scientists from lots of disciplines and I’m concerned about the rumour mill exploding. The more who know about this, the more likely we are to spring a leak. You might like to think about a cover story if it does get out, sir.'
'Yes. We will.'
'Tim Riley, my deputy, has made one or two contacts who I can quiz surreptitiously, but we’re likely to need university departmental researchers to make sense of the discoveries which I expect to arrive on an almost daily basis.'
'I see,' he said once more.
'I am not trying to make a case yet, Prime Minister, but by the end of January we’ll be swamped with questions my department will be unable to answer, so it seemed sensible to give you the heads-up on the situation. Also, I'd like to flag up that the US could be developing commercial aspects and if we aren’t doing the same, we might be left at a disadvantage.'
'Yes. Thank you, Dame Evelyn. Leave this with me and I'll come back to you as soon as I can. Continue to email me with new material, please.'
'Yes, Prime Minister.'
'And if your language guys come up with anything, put a red flash on the mail.'
'Will do, sir.'
'You are certain about how old this thing is?' he asked.
'No, not at all, but you can be fairly sure it’s at least one hundred million years old. We might be able to get a tighter date from a geologist.'
'But you’re sure it isn’t a recent object appearing to be older than it is?'
'No. Doctor Naughton had already said it was older than the pyramids from dust impacts alone. If you’re concerned it might be recent, it wouldn’t seem possible.'
'Could it be Martian?'
'I wouldn't think so, sir. Mars orbiters have shown no sign of any civilisation on the surface. You'd expect some signs such as roadways, dams, and cities.
'Okay, I understand.'
I decided to chance my hand, and added, 'The case for a general release of the discovery is growing, sir. If the public can accept the existence of an ancient device, any future contact will become much less threatening in their minds.'
'Still not convinced about that argument, Evelyn.'
'I understand, sir, but I'll keep making it. Everything I learned during my psychology doctorate tells me we’re making a mistake with this secrecy, so I'd be failing in my duty if I didn’t continue to make the case for drip-feed releases. Leaving it too long will inevitably mean any release will then be more rapid. That will have consequences.'
'Okay, Evelyn, I'll keep it in mind.'
'Please do, sir. I'll mail you updates as and when I have them and you can contact me anytime. I now have a secure Skype at home too. The Cabinet Secretary has the code.'
'Thank you, Evelyn. Congratulations on the work you’re all doing down there. Do please pass on my praise to your staff.'
'Yes, I will, Prime Minister. It’ll give them a boost.'
'Goodbye, Dame Evelyn.'
'Good day, Prime Minister.' The screen went back to my diary.
I pressed F14 and said, 'And is it all recorded, Janet?'
'It will have been, but I'll check and get back to you.'
'Thank you, Janet. I'm going to walk to one of the dishes to clear my mind. Don't disturb me unless it's urgent.'
My walk relieved the tension and I took a deep refreshing breath of the cold Cornish air, smelled the sea which was only a few kilometres away and, refreshed, walked back towards my office. The biting wind was now stinging my face. I increased my pace and welcomed the air-conditioned interior of the building as I hurried through the doors.
I was now ready for whatever mysteries would be revealed during the afternoon.
16 Their World
The images stored in AD1 were few and far between, but the hackers had found a way to quickly sift through the data and extract them. There were no more in cylinder two, nor three, nor four. Cylinder five had multiple images of Mercury, Mars, Earth, the moon, Jupiter without a red spot, Ganymede, Calisto, Io, Europa, Saturn, Titan, Enceladus, Uranus, Titania, Neptune, Triton, Pluto, Charon, and even some of the smaller moons of the gas giants. The images of Earth and Mars were fascinating and really needed to be shared. So much could be learned by detailed study of them. How could AD1 have visited all of these worlds? No one thought of the obvious answer to that question and I’d later look back upon this as a failing in our interpretation of the evidence. The next four cylinders again had no images.
The bulk of the rest of the data still wasn’t providing any further information, only strings of data in an unknown base format, although one of the hackers was working on an idea which was showing some potential. Whatever coding system the aliens used didn’t have any of the regular forms of computer language with which we were familiar. It seemed to come in an unending string of characters. Now we knew images were coded to base-8, it might help with the interpretation of other data. At least, we hoped it might. We also still had the problem that some of the cylinders kept changing their contents as if the data were still being manipulated. How could that be?
In the language laboratory, our experts were struggling to produce an alphabet from the packets of data, mainly because there seemed to be over one hundred different symbols or letters, if that was what the packets of data represented. There weren’t symbols or letters in the data, of course, only different sequences. Perhaps it was a language like Chinese, where there are hundreds of characters in use. Nevertheless, I’d been told the first stage would be the isolation of characters, so I shouldn’t expect too much too soon. Our problem, of course, was the lack of a Rosetta Stone to give an understanding of which words in one language were matched by the unknown hieroglyphs in the other. We can thank the Rosetta Stone for giving us such an excellent understanding of the ancient Egyptians.
Hans Meyer in the Cluster had found some more text on a panel behind a group of small cylinders and it had been passed to the language boys, but again, it had no meaning at this stage. We guessed it was about the cylinders or the wiring and it was likely to be some form of caution or instruction. At least that is what such a panel would be likely to portray in a human environment. The fact it ran into some six hundred characters of which there were forty-eight different types, was promising. Perhaps we had the entire alien alphabet there.
««o»»
I arrived at work on Tuesday twenty-fifth January, to find hacker, Mary Black, and computer head, John Sweet, waiting for me in reception in a state of some agitation.
‘You guys are keen,’ I said, checking the time and seeing it was only seven fifteen.
‘We were told you were usually in this early and last night, Mary struck gold in cylinder ten,’ said John with palpable excitement.
‘Come on then,’ I said.
We passed through the double doors and I opened the private entrance to my office. John walked straight over to my giant 8K monitor and slotted in a card.
‘Eight images,’ he said, ‘and we think it’s their world.’
Image one built up on the screen from top to bottom. It took about six seconds so must’ve been a large image.
I was staggered. An alien landscape and, more importantly, buildings. In the long sweep of astronomical speculation about alien life, this was a seminal moment. Such a privilege to be the first humans to see proof of another civilisation.
The buildings were mushroom-like structures reminiscent of door knobs, narrow where they sat upon the land and growing in diameter to form a compressed oblate spheroid. There were hundreds of them. Mos
t were of equal size but there were larger versions, never taller but even more compressed, analogous to a large cake stand with a single central support and a much larger compressed spheroid on top. Some were huge.
The image was the view from a high vantage point, probably atop a precipitous drop. We looked straight across a flat valley plain towards more cliffs on the other side. To the right of the image, the cliff from which the image was taken continued into the distance. On the opposite side of the valley the cliffs receded to the left and got closer to the right, suggesting they might meet somewhere off-screen right.
It would be impossible to judge scale accurately in such an alien environment, but I got the distinct impression the opposite cliffs were at least ten miles away. The rock faces seemed to be crumbling, had substantial screes, and there appeared to be tributary canyons leading off them, including hanging canyons which might once have spouted waterfalls and were evidence of ancient glaciation.
‘Did these images all have the same number of colour variations?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Doctor Slater,’ said Mary. ‘It’s possible they might be able to see through certain materials, especially with the X-ray components.’
‘You just speculating?’ I asked her.
John cut in, ‘Mary is, to a degree, but there’s evidence in some of these images that the aliens can see through objects. In some image variations, shapes can be seen in the buildings – not detailed, but ramps and floors et cetera. Circumstantial evidence comes from them having no windows in any of the buildings. There’s an even better example later.’
‘How high do you think the cliffs are?’ I asked.
‘No way of telling, Doctor Slater, but I’d guess in the order of two hundred metres,’ said John.
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