Dark Nights

by Christopher A. Gray

  Bishop briefed Doug on what to expect over the next few days. They talked about White House protocol and presentations Doug might be called upon to make including the possibility of a succinct one for the President and his staff. Doug would also have to present to the assembled experts who would themselves be making presentations about the object and its implications.

  “As a kid I remember reading something about rogue planets,” Bishop said, “probably in a comic book.”

  Doug laughed and took a sip of the bottled water given to him by an attendant.

  “This could be a rogue. Planets form around stars, but if another star passes too close, the gravitational interactions can fling a planet out of its system, so it travels through interstellar space. It’s even possible for a planet to be thrown out of the galaxy altogether.”

  “Could a rogue like that support any life?”

  “With no sun near enough for warmth, the planet would be put into a deep freeze. If our own Earth were suddenly flung out into space, we would have only starlight for illumination and all the oceans would freeze within weeks, though not all the way down due to hot thermal vents scattered around the globe. There might be a few small patches of open water and bare land, but for the most part there would be a global ice age. An ice age we wouldn’t come out of. The vast majority of species wouldn’t survive.”

  Doug turned back to the folder. He wanted to get as much information as possible. He called the number beside Foley’s name on the satellite phone list. The connection delay was very brief.

  “Stan, it’s Doug. Were you able to analyze the signal?”

  “We’re set up mainly for microwave. It was fairly weak. We couldn’t tell if it was natural or not but it stood out from the background. Obviously now that we have photos I’m leaning to the idea the planet had something to do with it.”

  “If another country discovered the planet before us they could have launched something to investigate, which might explain the signals,” Doug said.

  “Doubtful. We’ve been monitoring constantly and there’s been nothing since. I’m on a plane with an Agent Rector. He’s going to be my minder for the next few days at the Pentagon. Looks like you’ll get there first. Don’t let them name the planet after me, my wife will think it was my idea.”

  “That’s the least of our worries,” Doug replied

  The two scientists discussed the planet and its implications for a half hour. Doug was anxious to set up on the ground where he and his colleagues could work more efficiently.

  Doug’s stomach was unsettled. He was agitated by the implications of the discovery. A planet that had mysteriously popped into existence on the opposite side of the sun. The damn thing’s co-orbit may not be stable; it could oscillate, and conceivably crash into us, Doug thought, shifting in his seat. Foley had agreed. Doug reclined his seat, closed his eyes and tried to fall asleep. It never fully came to him because he kept coming back to the same issue again and again. How does a full-size planet materialize where there was nothing before?

  – 8 –

  Doug was jolted awake as they touched down at Joint Base Andrews. He hadn’t managed to sleep much, mainly just fitful dozing. He was still tired and he felt sluggish. Crossing so many time zones, he knew he’d be out of sync for a couple of days at least.

  Through the window Doug could see a helicopter warming up. He and Bishop unfastened their seat belts as the plane rolled to a stop. Both flight attendants wished Doug a good day as he followed Agent Bishop down the airstairs.

  “That’s our ride,” Bishop pointed as they walked the hundred meters to the idling helicopter. It was big, similar to the one Doug had seen the President use for short hops to the airport. A man identifying himself as a White House staffer greeted Doug and Bishop and joined them in the helicopter. There wasn’t much talking, and Doug wasn’t sitting close to a window. He used the ten minute flight to the White House to fully wake himself. Wherever we end up in the next short while, Doug thought, there better be coffee and lots of it.

  The helicopter touched down on the White House lawn. Several well-dressed men and women were in the general area nearby. An attendant opened the helicopter door and the men disembarked. The engine was shut down immediately but the blades were still turning at a fair clip, making enough noise so that everyone had to speak up during the introductions.

  An attractive and very professional-looking woman approached, smiling. She had brown hair, pulled back, and was impeccably dressed. Her body language suggested confidence, but there was some openness and approachability too. Practiced professionalism. Doug smiled and extended his hand to her but a man intercepted his handshake and introduced himself as an aide to the President. Doug guessed that this was a protocol move and that the science experts would take center stage soon enough, with much of the President’s staff taking a back seat. For now the staffer wanted center stage.

  “Hello Dr. Lockwood, glad you could come. I’m Arthur Leach, White House Chief of Staff, and this is Dr. Stacey Lau, our Chief Science Advisor.”

  “Dr. Lockwood and I have met.”

  Lau was attractive enough to be memorable, but Doug was tired. He needed a few seconds to realize she was correct. They had met several years earlier at a social gathering among the IPCC members. At the time, there’d been talk that in addition to Cheryl McBride, Lau was also being considered for the White House Science Advisor role. After Cheryl’s death he hadn’t paid much attention to the workings of the IPCC. He shook Stacey’s hand, and she smiled warmly.

  “Hello Doug, good to see you. I was so sorry to hear about Cheryl. Her loss was felt in the community. We have a lot to discuss, so come on inside.” Plenty of confidence, Doug thought wryly, and all business.

  Once inside, the small group walked down a wide hallway to a lounge area, where five men and two women were waiting. Leach asked everyone to surrender their mobile phones, laptops and tablets, then directed them to walk across the hall into a medium sized conference room. As Doug placed his phone in the basket he noticed that Agent Bishop stayed in the lounge area, along with a half-dozen other men. All security agents of some sort, Doug said under his breath, cool and professional, assigned to each of the other guests. It occurred to Doug that these agents were also in place to ensure the guests didn’t attempt any unauthorized communication or commit any other security transgressions. Count on surveillance everywhere.

  The conference room looked comfortable. There were notepads and pens in front of each of twenty chairs around a large rectangular meeting table. There was also a row of matte stainless steel coffee pots on a side table alongside several plates of sandwiches that were labeled – meat, fish, vegetarian, kosher – to prevent any catastrophic food emergencies. Doug dove for the coffee first and filled the largest cup he could find.

  The group of twelve, including Arthur Leach and Stacey Lau, grabbed what they wanted from the food platters and then found places at the meeting table. The other eight seemed to be a team of experts called in to consult on what Doug had started thinking of as The Problem. Doug recognized four of them as fellow astrophysicists working in different parts of the United States. The others were only vaguely familiar. Science community members no doubt, but Doug couldn’t place them exactly.

  As if on some subliminal cue, the room went silent. Everyone looked expectantly at Stacey Lau sitting at the head of the table. Leach placed a folder in front of her, which she immediately opened. A man who looked like an agent stamped out of the same mould as Bishop moved about the room depositing smaller folders in front of each scientist, then stood off to the side. Each folder was sealed with a strip of paper marked “Top Secret.”

  Leach sat to Stacey’s immediate left and quickly introduced everyone.

  “A brief bio of each participant is included in the first four pages in your information folder. You may open them now.”

  “You have been asked here,” Leach continued as everyone broke the seals on their folders, “not only for your sc
ientific expertise, but also because of your past dealings with the White House or high-level federal government agencies. Your previous security clearances are sufficient for this meeting and the information you’re about to receive. Dr. Lau?”

  “Thank you Arthur, and thank you everyone for coming. I realize it was very sudden, but as you know the circumstances are extraordinary. Approximately twelve hours ago we verified Dr. Lockwood’s co-discovery of an object in an orbit almost exactly opposite that of Earth. We’ve named the object FLO, for Foley-Lockwood Object. Dr. Stan Foley is on his way here from Chile and should be with us shortly. If you’ll turn to page five in your folder you will see the latest images and a summary of what we know so far.”

  Everybody quickly leafed to the fifth page. It contained two images of the planet. There were audible gasps from some of the members as each one looked closely. Even Doug was surprised by the quality of the images. They weren’t extremely large or detailed, but they were much better than the ones he had seen during his flight. Thanks to the STEREO satellites, each photo was taken from a slightly different angle.

  “How is this possible?” one scientist said, shaking his head. “Is it a reflection? Are we somehow looking at a projection of Earth, some kind of gravitational lens effect?”

  “Absolutely not,” said the woman beside him. “I’ve seen the image Dr. Lockwood first reported, then my team recorded an image with our own telescope in Arizona. This is a real body, orbiting the sun almost exactly opposite to us.”

  “That is correct,” Stacey confirmed. “This is a planet, remarkably like Earth. You’ve been brought here to help ascertain its origin, if it is a danger to us, and the feasibility of a reconnaissance mission.”

  “You say it was discovered only yesterday, but how long has it been there?” a woman sitting one chair down from Leach asked. “Could it have always been present, behind the sun, undetected?”

  Doug saw from the participant’s summary that her name was Dr. Janet Blair, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum mechanics. A summary item noted that she’d been nominated for a Nobel Prize, a fact that jogged Doug’s memory. He had read about her work on quantum biology and the theory that quantum mechanics influenced the processes of all living things.

  “No,” said a man sitting across from Doug. “I don’t think so. With all the probes we’ve sent out to study the sun and Venus, we would have seen it years ago.”

  Doug again glanced at the information in front of him. The speaker was Charles Singh, who had been a mission controller for the Shuttle program.

  “And to answer your question Dr. Lau, a proper reconnaissance mission would not be possible in the short term. We would need to use existing equipment, which is a problem because there is none. No country, including the United States, has any vehicle in inventory designed for a mission like this. We might be able to use older equipment in storage, but a lot of time would be needed to thoroughly test it all, bring it up to operating condition, transport it to a launch site and retest it.”

  Some of the participants looked surprised at Singh’s statement.

  “However, we could appropriate any number of communication satellites presently under construction and fit them with the required sensors. An Ariane 5 could be used as the launch vehicle, though there is a problem with that as well. The Ariane 5 was not designed for anything much beyond low Earth orbit, so any satellite launched would need to take advantage of a gravitational slingshot from Venus, and that’s assuming Venus is in the right position, which it may not be in three months from now which is the soonest we could launch.”

  “Best estimate, “Stacey asked. “How long would take to prepare a mission, launch it and reach optimal position for the sensors, assuming no slingshot is available?”

  “We would still need a slingshot effect, but using the Sun instead of Venus.” Singh thought for a moment. “We would launch a probe around the Sun, which would serve to slingshot it back to the same orbital position where we are now. In six months the other planet will be there, or rather here, in our present position, to meet the probe. As I said, the best case scenario for preparation and launch would be about three months from now, plus travel time of six months.

  “Nine months until a probe gets there?” Janet Blair was incredulous. “We don’t have any rockets capable of this right now?”

  “You must understand something,” Singh replied, shaking his head. “Our beyond Earth orbit launch capabilities peaked in the 1970’s with the Saturn V, and have gone downhill ever since. If this object had come to light in 1972 we could have launched something within weeks. Nowadays, without international cooperation we simply don’t have the means. And as you know, international projects must go through many approval hurdles.”

  “So are we incapable of keeping tabs on this planet until then?” Leach said.

  Doug realized several of them were looking at him for an answer.

  “We continue to observe the planet with space-based platforms like the STEREO satellites,” Doug said steadily, “and from ground-based observatories when feasible. That’s all we can do at the moment.”

  “Unfortunately that’s true,” Stacey said. “We will work on getting a probe ready, likely using one of the methods outlined by Mr. Singh, and where possible we will train optical and radio telescopes on the planet to get more data. But for now, we wish to discuss its origin. It does not appear to be a captured rogue. No observatory in the world saw it coming. Most of you have been aware of FLO for at least a few hours. Do you have theories on how it arrived in a stable orbit without being detected?”

  Nobody spoke.

  After a moment, the man to Doug’s right shifted in his seat and cleared his throat before speaking. “Could it have approached the solar system from directly behind the sun, so that its trajectory was masked?” The geologist, Jack Wilson was out of his element with the question.

  “That’s very unlikely,” Doug replied, “The solar system is itself moving in an orbit around the center of the galaxy, and the Earth is of course revolving around the Sun. Any planet approaching our solar system would take many years to get here, and during that time it couldn’t always be masked from view behind the Sun. There would have been periods where it was visible.”

  “But is it possible it may have been overlooked?”

  Doug paused. “Possible, yes, but we’re talking grand-prize lottery odds against it.”

  “Somebody has to win the lottery. Perhaps we did.”

  “I’d say it was impossible given the time frame. It appears to have an atmosphere and liquid water. Such a rogue would have been a huge frozen snowball travelling through interstellar space, and if captured into the sun’s orbit would have taken many years to thaw into its present state. We’d have noticed. No question about it.”

  Stacey typed something into her laptop. “I’m not one for playing the lottery either. Any alternatives?”

  “Well, if it appeared suddenly out of nowhere,” Janet said, “could it be from another dimension?”

  The group paused. They looked around at each other, wondering if anyone agreed. For many of them, Janet’s comment seemed far too implausible for comfort.

  “It is theoretically possible,” Janet continued calmly. “It is the consensus among theoretical physicists that other dimensional realities exist.”

  “Certainly,” Singh replied, “but there isn’t a doorway between dimensions. How could an object in one dimension appear in another? That isn’t even possible for neutrinos, much less a planet. It seems even more unlikely than the rogue capture theory.”

  “More unlikely than a planet drifting in from an unknown location,” Janet asked, “taking years to get here without being seen by thousands of amateur and professional astronomers, then settling into what appears to be a perfect orbit, directly opposite from us?”

  Doug agreed. “As incredible as it sounds, for now, I like that explanation more than the rogue theory. The fact that the planet is directly opposite,
or in what’s known as a counter orbit, is extremely lucky. So lucky that I have trouble believing it was a coincidence. If it appeared much further ahead or behind us on the orbital path, gravitational oscillations over time might result in a collision, though it would take a few years to happen.”

  “Is there any danger of the planet falling behind or ahead of us in its orbit?” Stacey asked.

  Doug glanced down at the information sheet. “Over time, yes. Any counter orbit such as this is not perfectly stable. If the data is correct and the planet’s distance from the sun is the same as ours, the main determining factor would be its mass. If its mass were to differ greatly from that of Earth, orbital oscillations would occur fairly quickly, since the mass difference would amplify this instability, eventually leading to a collision in only a couple of decades from now.”

  The bleak assessment got everyone’s attention.

  “Assuming its mass is similar to ours, there will still be some natural perturbations in both directions due to gravitational interactions with Venus and Mars as their yearly orbits periodically bring them closer to the planet. Medium term, say after several decades, orbital oscillations will eventually grow more severe. We’ll need more data, but Dr. Foley and I agree that even in a best-case scenario there is the likelihood of a collision sometime in the next century.”

  Singh leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Janet looked dazed. Doug felt as if he had delivered a death sentence to the Earth, despite the fact its enactment was set in probabilities a lifetime from now. The group was silent for a moment.

  Singh finally broke the silence.

  “How long before the existence of FLO becomes common knowledge?”

  “Possibly no more than a few hours, given that Russia, France, and a few other countries have sophisticated satellites in orbit that are capable of detecting it,” Stacey said.

  Most of the group turned, fractionally, in Doug’s direction. He nodded his agreement with Lau.