Miranda's Demons

by Ian Miller

  But what was it that led to such censorship? The first paper noted that the orbits of the three rocky planets did not follow the Bode-Titius law, and that the orbits of two of them did not fit into any theory of planetary formation. While unexpected, that was hardly likely to lead to the collapse of civilization! Harry knew that the encouragement of scientific dissension was more the myth than the reality, but a deviation from Bode's law seemed hardly worth such heavy-handedness, particularly when there were so many other systems that deviated. The other claimed to have observed anomalous electromagnetic radiation emissions that appeared to have incredible blue shifts. The only possible explanation appeared to be that the motors of an advanced space ship had been detected. There was an immediate flurry of speculation that at last a planet with advanced technology had been located, and so close to Earth.

  Perhaps that was it! If Harry could prove that, what a project! Not that he could, he reflected glumly, his mood now changing to reflect reality. First, there were the laws of evolution. Epsilon eridani was a very young star. There might be life on planets around it, but nothing bigger than a bacterium would have had time to evolve. Which left open the question, why was study forbidden? The nature of the inner planets about such a young star should settle the question for once and for all what the conditions were likely to be when biogenesis got underway. The issue was important because the generation of life required specific conditions, and it was important to know whether these were likely to be common or highly unusual.

  All of which was also irrelevant because he could not even locate the planets in one night. The necessary background was missing from the computer files, at least those he had access to. And even if he did find the planets, it was certain that he would never reach an academy. Defence did not reward smart-arses! So back to his current problem: he badly needed something better than a discarded lump of metal to justify access to this telescope array.

  One possibility might have been a really good asteroid, coming close to the Earth, which could be useful as the basis of a space colony. The great space colonies at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points were marvels of technology and persistence. The colony at L-5 was forty kilometers long and one at L-4 was even bigger. Inside these great rotating cylinders, assembled by robots from materials flung up from the moon, people had built farms, cities and virtually all requirements for a relatively luxurious lifestyle. The volatiles were obtained by even more difficult means: high velocity carbonaceous chondrite asteroids and icy bodies from further out had been caught and decelerated using a reverse mass driver. This was an incredibly tricky manoeuvre, and made water incredibly expensive, yet it was possible to canoe down streams and sail yachts in sizeable lakes. Centrifugal force provided almost 1 g on most of the colonies, and they were the only space colonies with sufficient "gravity" to allow settlers to return to Earth without significant discomfort.

  A sizeable asteroid would have its own material. Many students had studied the Apollo asteroids, or even the Amor asteroids, in the hopes of having a colony named after them, but now the supply of unstudied asteroids had dried up. Another possibility was a far out icy Centaur; if it could be brought in to nudge an Apollo with one or both ending on an Earth-Sun Trojan point . . ? But he was dreaming. The academies wanted simple tabulations of data, not adventurous proposals that were economically near impossible to fulfil.

  In a nutshell, Harry's problem was that he was short of a project. He had searched and searched, but it is difficult to find what is not there. He had tried; he had spent weeks on this great optical telescope in the near desert outback, but he had found nothing. Perhaps, Harry mused, Snyder's gift was intended to be more of a Trojan horse. Well, then, Harry thought, I hope Snyder has a good grasp of physics, because he was going to need it to open the Trojan gates.

  He looked towards the clock. Nearly time! He put the key into the lock and turned, then carefully pulled down the console. Even he was impressed with what happened. Most of the wall folded away, a series of keyboards folded out, and what had been a wall was now a sequence of giant screens. He keyed in his password, and the screens came to life. The deep space array was now under his control.

  The modern observatory was an amazing collection of technology, so much so that the 'observer' did very little observing. Once upon a time, Harry realized, observers had to steer larger telescopes by sighting with smaller 'finding' telescopes. Now, the observer examined tables, typed in the details, and waited for the computers to do what was required. Which was all very well, except that you focussed on what the instructions required, which meant that you knew where the object was. Unfortunately he did not seem to have an object. He continued keying in coordinates, and the great deep space telescope complex turned its attention, for twelve hours only, on Uranus. He was down to his fall-back project: the effect of sunspot activity on the magnetosphere of Uranus. This was not the material to set the world on fire, and the bad luck that had seemingly dogged him had continued. There had been remarkably little sunspot activity over the period during which coronal mass ejections would strike Uranus while he was viewing. His project now would have to be something along the lines of the effect of the absence of sunspot activity on the magnetosphere of Uranus. Effectively he had to throw the judges a raw prawn.

  Unfortunately the outer solar system was too cold for long-term settlement, and the satellites at these distances were considered to be too icy to be of interest for mining. The gravitational fields of the moons were too low for long-term comfort, but the masses were too high to create artificial gravity by centrifugal forces. In short, they were useless. Except, Harry's prawn would propose, possibly for the very inner moons of Uranus. These were very small, and could be "spun up". It was possible they could make useful bases for the proposed assembly of deep space vehicles, but of course they were deeply immersed in the magnetosphere of Uranus, hence the relevance of the fall-back study. Accordingly, it would be important . . . this part needed more work! . . . to know about the magnetosphere effects in the absence of coronal mass ejections. His best chance to get away with that, he thought, would be if the judges knew absolutely nothing about physics, and were impressed by the prodigious number of equations he could use.

  The best that could be said about this proposal was that it did technically complete the requirements, and it would certainly be different from the other contenders. If only the judges would fall into the trap of equating different with good.

  There remained one possible alternative, one last straw for a drowning Harry to grasp. When he had studied the photographs from his previous observations, he had noticed something quite unusual: a new light source, which, on ultra magnification, had been resolved into several point sources. He had run the usual computer subtractions from the standard database, which was a useful way of detecting new objects, and they remained. How they had never been found before was a complete puzzle for while they were a reasonable distance from the ecliptic, that region had been intensely searched, and while these were not exactly bright, they could be detected on the largest telescopes employed by amateurs. The spectral analysis was odd too; the usual identifiable lines were missing. Perhaps he had discovered something! Most likely a glitch in the spectrometer or the computer analysers, he thought to himself.

  This time he could have his cake and eat it. While the giant array was collecting data on Uranus, he could catalogue his objects. They might be outside the scope of his project, but additional material might just give him the edge he needed. Of course if the spectrometer was not misbehaving, he might even have discovered something; quasars did not have identifiable lines until the spectral shift was recognized. He was almost feeling more cheerful as he peered at the visual display screen. There, at the bottom of the screen, that is, nearest the horizon, was Aldebaran. He moved the screen up five degrees, keyed in the background array, and hit subtract. The screen was black.

  He stared in disbelief. Impossible! He rechecked the coordinates, relocked the telescope, and a
gain hit subtract. Still nothing! He stared at his photographs, then he realized what must have happened. There was an old saying that all was fair in love and war; apparently the same could be said for getting into the space academy. Harry was only too painfully aware that he had a reputation for being an easy victim, for taking too much at face value, for not realizing that people told lies or stretched the truth, or even, it seemed, would try to destroy his reputation. But this seemed a very strange prank. Surely none of his competitors would think he would fall for that? With no identifiable spectrum, he would surely have searched again? Then there was the question of how anyone had got at his data.

  That question was, perhaps, not so difficult. He loved Jane, and while he was certain that Jane loved him, she was always trying to impress someone. She must have told his friends in the physics lab; this would be just the sort of prank that would appeal to them. If Jane had told them that he needed a discovery, those rats might well have provided him with one. Possibly with Snyder's blessing!

  Harry was aware that he was a target in more ways than one. Harry had always been an enigma for the other students. From all his actions, he was clearly not from a corporate family, yet as a consequence of the diamond card, he owned a flat in a block reserved for the families of very senior corporates. None of those who knew him knew what school he had attended; that was because he had not attended a "respectable" school. What nobody knew was that Harry had been brought up as an independent. Harry kept this very quiet, not because he was afraid, but because he believed that a little mystery would bring him access to girls. The only conclusion everyone could come to was that Harry was the son of one of the very top corporates, not one of the salaried, but one of the owners. That made him a magnet for the otherwise inaccessible girls, and he had revelled in this totally unjustifiable reputation. Until, that is, he had met Jane.

  Jane was different. She was beautiful, vivacious, and marvellous at parties. She did not fawn over him, indeed, if anything, she had this slightly irritating habit of neglecting him at times. Her family were probably upper middle corporates; unlike most of the others, she kept quiet about her family connections. Possibly she did not have any, which would have made her somewhat undesirable to the corporate climbing males at university. But a lack of openings for nepotism in the corporations did not worry Harry; he had no intention of joining one. He intended to go into space. Come to think of it, Jane was less than keen on this idea; perhaps she had intentionally organized this prank to keep him back in Australia.

  He returned to the keyboard, and keyed in the coordinates for Uranus. As the mountings of the great telescope began to creak and groan again as it swung around, he poured himself a cup of coffee, and sipped. As he sat back and stared at the dials, he became more relaxed. Perhaps, after all, he had merely found a computer glitch. Hardly a discovery worthy of accelerated admission to the space academy, but it got around the problem of how people got at his data, and also explained why there was no spectrum. Just because everyone was out to get him, there was no need to become paranoid!

  As the telescope reached its new orientation he keyed up the wide-angle display. There was a large selection of light points, a random scatter of stars to the uninitiated. But Harry was not uninitiated. He quickly found Castor and Pollux, then drew, in his mind, a line to Zeta Tauri; intersect that with the line between Beta Tauri and Eta Geminorum, and there it should be. Two objects close together, and the one at the centre of his display should be Uranus. This could quickly be checked, as he keyed in for the stellar background to be subtracted. As expected, there in the centre of the screen, as required, was the green ball Uranus, and three of the major satellites were also visible.

  As were his cluster of light points, although they were no longer so bright or clearly resolvable. It was now clear why nobody had discovered them before; they were moving and they had variable intensity! Movement meant that they were in the solar system, and the fact they had not been discovered presumably meant that Harry had spotted them at a time during which they had . . . had what? None of this made sense to Harry. How could objects in the solar system, which were presumably detectable through reflected sunlight, have variable intensity? Could they flare up, like a comet, and thus increase their surface area and hence reflect more light?

  It was clear that his finding them was a sheer accident. Perhaps his luck had changed, but which way? Discovering new objects was only the beginning; he then had to characterize them. That would normally be easy as there was a pattern to every type of object, and that pattern allowed immediate identification. These objects, however, did not seem to fit any recognizable pattern. To begin with, they were going in the opposite direction to the normal planetary orbits. Objects this radically unusual could be more a curse than a blessing.

  What could they be, and why so many? There were at least twenty-seven light sources, all travelling with the same velocity, and there, by Uranus, was another one, which was somewhat duller. He compared the pattern on his photograph with the one on the screen. The pattern of the main group was the same, but the objects had now come closer together, and his first photograph did not contain this isolated light. It was difficult to see that they could be natural; two dozen asteroids of that brightness, that close together, would have been noticed long ago. Perhaps they were pieces of comet? He stared at the photograph, and after some closer examination, he was convinced that the objects were not round; they seemed to have tails. That was it! He had discovered a comet that had broken up. Not that the astronomical tables gave any indication of a comet at this location, but it could be an extremely long period comet. But if that were the case, why had it broken up, and the pieces then stayed so closely together? And, for that matter, appeared to have come closer together? To say nothing of the last problem: if these objects were this close, and the elongations were cometary tails, why were the tails not pointing away from the sun?

  The other alternative was that they were man-made. At least twenty-seven of them? The Mars cargo craft always travelled singly, and anyway there were not twenty-seven Mars craft in existence. The only organization that could conceivably have twenty-seven craft would be Defence. If the lights were motor exhaust, and it was hard to think what else they could be if they were craft, who would fire motors for two days? Only ships leaving the Earth system! To go where? For that matter, where did they come from, on that particular path? And why were the tails pointing into the direction of travel? If they were motor exhausts, that would indicate they were slowing down, not starting up.

  Who could have launched them? Even Defence could hardly launch twenty-seven craft into space for an extended journey without NewsCorp finding out, or for that matter, Independent News. No, it would be impossible to launch at least twenty-seven craft from Earth or the colonies without anybody knowing.

  So what were they? One piece of fortune, good or bad, was that since they now had the same angular coordinates as Uranus, the deep space telescopes would give him as much information as could be obtained. And he had better do something about those telescopes. A series of operations had to be checked, as the user of the telescope cluster was responsible for the various automated satellite functions. He set the local telescope into the recording mode, locked the orientation into automatic tracking, and returned to the other console. All telescopes were locked on Uranus, and were recording as intended. Harry picked up the manual, and started keying in commands. This procedure might be routine, he thought, but it was certainly time consuming. Still, it was part of the price he had to pay, and he was glad to pay it.

  Two hours later, he strode back to his stock of coffee, poured another cup, then he went back to the local telescope's display. There, in the centre of the display, was Uranus, but the other lights had disappeared. As far as his studies on Uranus went, there was a redundant optical telescope, namely the one in the observatory he had used before to find the lights. Time to put it to good use! He quickly keyed in some commands to another console, then he began s
earching. He had moved through over a degree when the single light came into view, but search as hard as he could, there was no sign of the others. He then decided to lock the ground-based telescope onto the remaining light: a computer now ensured that this object remained in the centre of the display, while the coordinates were recorded. With this done, he had nothing to do. Time, he thought, for more coffee and sandwiches.

  The light fascinated him. To have so much angular movement, either it was very close or was moving at enormous speed. His fellow students at Sydney University were always going on about the excessive spending by Defence on developing new military hardware that was totally irrelevant. After all, there were no enemies that could offer a serious threat to the Federation. However, there were also rumours that much of this money was being spent on developing an interstellar drive. Suppose he was viewing the initial trials? Such trials would be highly secret, and if he had the data, why, anything could happen. He could be an instant hero in the media, provided he was prepared to give up his ambitions to join the Space Corps. Alternatively, this knowledge just might suffice for a project. Defence could possibly smooth his way, because the alternative would be grossly unwelcome public disclosure. Some would call that implied bribery, but admission to the Space Corps was highly competitive, and his competitors would not hesitate. He would have to think about this, and quickly because in two weeks Commissioner Kotchetkova was to speak at Sydney University. That was the time to do whatever he decided to do.

  He went back to his telescope with yet another coffee. The light source was still moving, and was roughly where he expected it to be. But there was, perhaps, something strange about it. He checked the dials, and found he was correct; the signal strength was higher. If it were a motor firing at a constant power output, then it was coming closer. If it were coming closer, Newton's second law meant it was decelerating. Which meant it had started a long way out there!