A Step Farther Out

by Jerry Pournelle

  * * *

  OK again. Some readers have always "believed" in UFO's. Some others may now be convinced there's something there, and rather a larger number are probably convinced that I believe there's something there.

  So what are they?

  * * *

  Gee, I don't know. I used to say I was uninterested in UFO's because they just couldn't be intelligent critters. Why couldn't they? Because there was no place they could have come from. Earth? Not really likely. The Solar System? Unlikely a few years ago, virtually impossible now given what we've learned about the other planets.

  Another star system, then. Now that really raises problems. How do they get here? Faster than light travel? Science fiction aside, although the General Theory of Relativity isn't anywhere near universally accepted, the Special Theory forbids faster than light travel by material objects, and gets more and more corroboration every year.

  But then, so what? Do I really "believe in" the absolute limit of the speed of light? No. I accept it as a probable working hypothesis, but I firmly hope to see faster than light (FTL) travel in my lifetime. I hope to see it; but I can't tell you how it will happen, and the evidence is all against me. Still, I do not rule out FTL as impossible, and thus I can't say interstellar visitors are impossible either.

  This is the point at which scientists get nervous. Not only Hynek, but men like Dr. Robert Wood (BSEE, Aeronautical Engineering: PhD, Physics, Cornell) who is an engineering manager for a large aerospace firm he'd rather not have named in an article on UFO's; a Nobel Laureate who'd rather not be named at all; all of them say almost exactly the same thing when you ask, "What do you think UFO's are?"

  They say: "You want some wild guesses? Hypotheses we'd be willing to defend at a scientific meeting? Science fiction? Where's this going to be published, anyway?"

  Nervous indeed. Every one of them wants it clearly understood they're talking hypotheses, theories which not only may not be true, but probably aren't true; speculations, if you will.

  Begin with Dr. Wood. "I'd now be willing to defend the extra-terrestrial hypothesis at an AAAS or AIAA panel meeting."

  Continue with Dr. Hynek: "They seem to act intelligently. I wouldn't be surprised to see proof that they're observers from another stellar system. I don't say that's what they are, or that I 'believe' in little men from outer space; but I wouldn't be shocked to see it proved."

  Continue further with Hynek We ask how they got here, given special relativity and all that. "People want answers, but we have none to give. Yet I suspect we may be witnessing something as far beyond us as, say, television would have been to Plato. After all, not too many years ago the best minds in the world couldn't explain the Northern Lights. They were there. You could observe them. But we hadn't the basic science to begin to understand them. I think that's what we've got here."

  In fact, it is precisely this that interests Dr. Hynek, and probably most other UFO scientists as well. Understanding UFO's may lead us to new sciences far beyond anything we have or can even imagine. It is this which leads Hynek to hope the UFO Center he founded will be his scientific legacy.

  * * *

  What are some ways the UFO's and their hypothetical inhabitants might achieve FTL? Hynek: "Perhaps they aren't material in the way we think; that they use something like television to transport themselves. Matter transportation, whether instantaneous or at very high velocity." Robert Wood: "I haven't a clue. Yet there's been a small revival of interest in ether theories lately, have you noticed? Perhaps Special Relativity doesn't hold after all.

  "Also, there's the possibility of gravitational interactions. Or try this: these things are generally reported accompanied by a really overwhelming magnetic field. What IS the speed of light in a billion gauss magnetic field? What ever it is, I'm sure there's no magic here, and it may be consistent with science we are about to discover ourselves."

  Hmm. These are scientists, not SF writers.

  * * *

  In other words, although we "know" that UFO's with intelligent inhabitants can't come from our solar system and can't get here from any other, we've "known" a few other things that turned out not to be so. It hasn't been all that long since we "knew" the Law- of Conservation of Matter; that atoms couldn't be split; that the Sun couldn't possibly have been burning for longer than a few thousand, uh, hundred thousand, well, we can prove not longer than a million years; that heavier than air craft couldn't fly, certainly couldn't fly faster than the speed of sound; that nothing could get into outer space from here, well, not very far out, anyway; and so forth. Now some things we "know" turn out to be true, and maybe Special Relativity will be one of them; but maybe it won't, either.

  Assume the UFO's employ a technology capable of interstellar travel. What the devil are they doing here, and why don't they make contact with us and get it over with?

  Well, of course, there are a few who say they have made contact with them, but no one wants to believe the stories. Most contact stories show the aliens displaying about the same kind of interest in us as we do in, say, Trobriand Islanders, or Coming of Age in Samoa. Discount the contact reports, and it's still not a bad hypothesis. I know of little to contradict the view that UFO's are mostly filled with graduate students doing a doctoral dissertation on pre-space-flight cultures.

  That explains why they don't make unambiguous contacts. If they did, we wouldn't be a pre-spaceflight culture anymore; at the least we'd be going balls out to develop space flight. It also explains the sightings: they don't want to be seen, but once in a while they get careless, as students do.

  For that matter, I can envision an extra-terrestrial persuading hiser (no sexists here; they're hermaphroditic) sponsor to let them make "a non-contaminating close encounter. After all, Honored Academician, the observers won't be believed. And you've said my thesis isn't original enough, but all the routine observation stuff has been mined out. . ."

  Or what the hell, sometimes they get drunk and put on a show for the primitives, gambling that they won't be reported to their academic superiors. Pasadena knows all about that phenomenon: in the areas around Cal Tech the residents shudder as certain times of the year approach.

  But blast it all, Pournelle, surely you don't believe that?

  No. But I wouldn't die of astonishment if it turned out to be true, either. I don't "believe in" flying saucers in the sense that I spend much of my time acting as if Earth were being observed by interstellar graduate students in sophontology; I'm merely inclined to think it's possible, and unable to think of a good alternate theory to account for the UFO observations.

  Yes. I know. The extra-terrestrial theory doesn't account for all the observations. On the other hand we don't have any theories that account for all the observations of Martian geography, either, but that doesn't stop me from playing with about half a dozen mutually exclusive hypotheses about Mars.

  I do think this. If the "unimaginative" experts of Big Science can take UFO's seriously, while we won't even discuss them, what happens to science fiction writers' reputations as speculators? Not that we need contests on how many impossible things we can believe before breakfast; but can we not at least speculate consistent with the observations? Do we, of all people, dare ignore UFO's now that study of them is respectable?

  * * *

  [All the above was written two years before I ever heard of the film Close Encounters; it has needed no revision and so I offer none. JEP]

  Although Larry Niven and I do a lot of fiction together (MOTE IN GOD'S EYE, INFERNO, LUCIFER'S HAMMER, OATH OF FEALTY, SPIRALS, etc.), we generally don't work together on non-fiction. However, after MOTE IN GOD'S EYE achieved some popularity, Jim Baen, then editor at Galaxy, asked us to do an essay on the "science" in MOTE.

  The result, which concludes Part II, is about as far out as you can get.

  Building the Mote in God's Eye

  by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  Collaborations are unnatural. The writer is a jealous god. He builds his
universe without interference. He resents the carping of mentally deficient critics and the editor's capricious demands for revisions. Let two writers try to make one universe, and their defenses get in the way.

  But. Our fields of expertise matched each the other's blind spots, unnaturally well. There were books neither of us could write alone. We had to try it.

  At first we were too polite, too reluctant to criticize each other's work. That may have saved us from killing each other early on, but it left flaws that had to be torn out of the book later.

  We had to build the worlds. From Motie physiognomy we had to build Motie technology and history and life styles. Niven had to be coached in the basic history of Pournelle's thousand-year-old interstellar culture.

  It took us three years. At the end we had a novel of 245,000 words. . . which was too long. We cut it to 170,000, to the reader's great benefit. We cut 20,000 words off the beginning, including in one lump our first couple of months of work: a Prologue, a battle between spacegoing warcraft, and a prison camp scene. All of the crucial information had to be embedded in later sections.

  We give that Prologue here. When the Moties and the Empire and the star systems and their technologies and philosophies had become one interrelated whole, this is how it looked from New Caledonia system. We called it

  MOTELIGHT

  Last night at this time he had gone out to look at the stars. Instead a glare of white light like an exploding sun had met him at the door, and when he could see again a flaming mushroom was rising from the cornfields at the edge of the black hemisphere roofing the University. Then had come sound, rumbling, rolling across the fields to shake the house.

  Alice had run out in terror, desperate to have her worst fears confirmed, crying, "What are you learning that's worth getting us all killed?"

  He'd dismissed her question as typical of an astronomer's wife, but in fact he was learning nothing. The main telescope controls were erratic, and nothing could be done, for the telescope itself was on New Scotland's tiny moon. These nights interplanetary space rippled with the strange lights of war, and the atmosphere glowed with ionization from shock waves, beamed radiation, fusion explosions. . . He had gone back inside without answering.

  Now, late in the evening of New Scotland's 27 hour day, Thaddeus Potter, PhD strolled out into the night air.

  It was a good night for seeing. Interplanetary war could play hell with the seeing; but tonight the bombardment from New Ireland had ceased. The Imperial Navy had won a victory.

  Potter had paid no attention to the newscasts; still, he appreciated the victory's effects. Perhaps tonight the war wouldn't interfere with his work. He walked thirty paces forward and turned just where the roof of his house wouldn't block the Coal Sack. It was a sight he never tired of.

  The Coal Sack was a nebular mass of gas and dust, small as such things go—eight to ten parsecs thick—but dense, and close enough to New Caledonia to block a quarter of the sky. Earth lay somewhere on the other side of it, and so did the Imperial Capital, Sparta, both forever invisible. The Coal Sack hid most of the Empire, but it made a fine velvet backdrop for two close, brilliant stars.

  And one of them had changed drastically.

  Potters face changed too. His eyes bugged. His lantern jaw hung loose on its hinges. Stupidly he stared at the sky as if seeing it for the first time.

  Then, abruptly, he ran into the house.

  Alice came into the bedroom as he was phoning Edwards. "What's happened?" she cried. "Have they pierced the shield?"

  "No," Potter snapped over his shoulder. Then, grudgingly, "Something's happened to the Mote."

  "Oh for God's sake!" She was genuinely angry, Potter saw. All that fuss about a star, with civilization falling around our ears! But Alice had no love of the stars.

  Edwards answered. On the screen he showed naked from the waist up, his long curly hair a tangled bird's nest. "Who the hell—? Thad. I might have known. Thad, do you know what time it is?"

  "Yes. Go outside," Potter ordered. "Have a look at the Mote."

  "The Mote? The Mote?"

  "Yes. It's gone nova!" Potter shouted. Edwards growled, then sudden comprehension struck. He left the screen without hanging up. Potter reached out to dial the bedroom window transparent. And it was still there.

  Even without the Coal Sack for backdrop Murcheson's Eye would be the brightest object in the sky. At its rising the Coal Sack resembled the silhouette of a hooded man, head and shoulders; and the off-centered red supergiant became a watchful, malevolent eye. The University itself had begun as an observatory founded to study the supergiant.

  This eye had a mote: a yellow dwarf companion, smaller and dimmer, and uninteresting. The Universe held plenty of yellow dwarfs.

  But tonight the Mote was a brilliant blue-green point. It was almost as bright as Murcheson's Eye itself, and it burned with a purer light. Murcheson's Eye was white with a strong red tinge; but the Mote was blue-green with no compromise, impossibly green.

  Edwards came back to the phone. "Thad, that's no nova. It's like nothing ever recorded. Thad, we've got to get to the observatory!"

  "I know. I'll meet you there."

  "I want to do spectroscopy on it."

  "All right."

  "God, I hope the seeing holds! Do you think we'll be able to get through today?"

  "If you hang up, we'll find out sooner."

  "What? Och, aye." Edwards hung up.

  * * *

  The bombardment started as Potter was boarding his bike. There was a hot streak of light like a very large shooting star; and it didn't burn out, but reached all the way to the horizon. Stratospheric clouds formed and vanished, outlining the shock wave. Light glared on the horizon, then faded gradually.

  "Damn," muttered Potter, with feeling. He started the motor. The war was no concern of his, except that he no longer had New Irish students. He even missed some of them. There was one chap from Cohane who. . .

  A cluster of stars streaked down in exploding fireworks.

  Something burned like a new star overhead. The falling stars winked out, but the other light went on and on, changing colors rapidly, even while the shock wave clouds dissipated. Then the night became clear, and Potter saw that it was on the moon.

  What could New Ireland be shooting at on New Scotland's moon?

  Potter understood then. "You bastards!" he screamed at the sky. "You lousy traitor bastards!"

  The single light reddened.

  He stormed around the side of Edwards' house shouting, "The traitors bombed the main telescope! Did you see it? All our work—oh."

  He had forgotten Edwards' backyard telescope.

  It had cost him plenty, and it was very good, although it weighed only four kilograms. It was portable—"Especially," Edwards used to say, "when compared with the main telescope."

  He had bought it because the fourth attempt at grinding his own mirror produced another cracked disk and an ultimatum from his now dead wife concerning Number 200 Carbo grains tracked onto her New-Life carpets. . .

  Now Edwards moved away from the eyepiece saying, "Nothing much to see there." He was right. There were no features. Potter saw only a uniform aquamarine field.

  "But have a look at this!" said Edwards. "Move back a bit. . ." He set beneath the eyepiece a large sheet of white paper, then a wedge of clear quartz.

  The prism spread fan-shaped rainbow across the paper. But the rainbow was almost too dim to see, vanishing beside a single line of aquamarine; and that line blazed.

  "One line," said Potter. "Monochromatic?" "I told you yon was no nova."

  "Too right it wasn't. But what is it? Laser light? It has to be artificial! Lord, what a technology they've built!"

  "Och, come now." Edwards interrupted the monologue. "I doubt yon's artificial at all. Too intense." His voice was cheerful. "We're seeing something new. Somehow yon Mote is generating natural coherent light."

  "I don't believe it."

  Edwards looked annoyed. A
fter all, it was his telescope. "What think you, then? Some booby calling for help? If they were that powerful, they would send a ship. A ship would come thirty-five years sooner!"

  "But there's no tramline from the Mote to New Caledonia! Not even theoretically possible. Only link to the Mote has to start inside the Eye. Murcheson looked for it, you know, but he never found it. The Mote's alone out there."

  "Och, then how could there be a colony?" Edwards demanded in triumph. "Be reasonable, Thad! We have a new natural phenomenon, something new in stellar process."

  "But if someone is calling—"

  "Let's hope not. We could no help them. We couldn't reach them, even if we knew the links! There's no starship in the New Cal system, and there's no likely to be until the war's over." Edwards looked up at the sky. The moon was a small, irregular half-disk; and a circular crater still burned red in the dark half.