Alpha Centauri: First Landing (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 1)

by Alastair Mayer

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The crew were assembled in the inflated docking hub, the only volume suitable. The hoses and cables which had been left drifting during Anderson’s emergency undocking were now properly stowed or reconnected. But, after several weeks with half the crew on-planet, it still seemed downright crowed.

  Drake called on Sawyer to present the geology team’s findings.

  “I’ll give the planetological assessment first,” she began, “and the geological follow through on the planet itself. Okay, background. We’ve got a twin star system, both stars about five billion years old, just a bit older than our Sun—”

  “Can we skip ahead to the bits we don’t know?” Of course that was Darwin. “We all got that briefing before we came out here. Even me.”

  At his last comment, Sawyer bit back what she’d been about to say, and instead said: “Okay, fair enough. First point, there’s too much water on Kakuloa.” That drew a round of laughter. She wondered what was so funny, then realized. “Aside from the flood, I mean. Okay, bear with me for a moment.

  “First, even though more of the surface is ocean compared to Earth, on average the oceans are shallower, and the continents are thinner. That’s troubling for a planet this old, but it means there’s less water than on Earth. There’s still more than there should be, though.

  “Stable planetary orbits around A and B are within what we call the snow line, or the ice line, the distance from the star at which it’s cool enough for water to freeze. That’s good in that it means liquid water can exist. That’s bad because it means when the planet is forming, it won’t collect ice grains, and water molecules will tend not to condense with the protoplanet. That means the inner planets should be dry.” She looked over at Vukovich, the astrophysicist. “Greg, how am I doing?”

  “So far so good. There are some alternate theories, but what you’ve described is the current wisdom.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  “But what about Earth?” Klaar asked.

  “That’s where the problem arises in this system. In our Solar System, gravitational interactions with Jupiter pushed material from just beyond the snow line inwards, accounting for maybe half of Earth’s water. After that, interactions between Jupiter and the other giant planets—Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—pushed Neptune from where it originally formed, closer to the Sun, out into the outer solar system. As it went it stirred up the Kuiper belt, sending a rain of comets into the inner solar system. Some of those crashed on Earth, filling up the ocean basins with yet more water. This all happened within the first hundred million years or so of the planets forming.”

  “So, couldn’t that have happened here?” said Klaar.

  “If it were an isolated star, yes, but it’s a double. From just beyond Kakuloa’s orbit out to well beyond both stars, orbits around one star get disrupted by the other. Anything much beyond the snow line gets thrown out to deep space.”

  “But there is a cometary belt here. We had a nasty reminder of that.”

  “The Xīng Huā, yes. But that’s 70 AUs out, and the point is that there was never a Neptune, or any other gas giant, that formed and migrated out to disrupt their orbits. There should never have been a rain of comets on Kakuloa, or on Able, they should be dry planets.”

  “Wouldn’t the other star be enough to cause that” Simms, the meteorologist, asked.

  Sawyer glanced over at Vukovich. “Greg?”

  “Not if it formed first,” the astrophysicist said. “The possible exception is if A and B didn’t form as a double but they captured each other later, after the planets formed.” He quickly raised his hand to quell the obvious next questions. “The outermost planets of either star would have been lost, but the orbits of close-in planets might be stable. However, the problem with that is that both stars are, as best we can tell, the same age, so probably formed in the same nebula. The other problem is that both stars’ planets’ orbits, and the orbits of the stars around each other, are all more or less in the same plane. The odds on either of those happening by chance are, well, astronomical.”

  “So, how did Kakuloa get its water?”

  “I have no idea,” Vukovich said. “The explanation I’m going to go with for now is that the two stars captured each other after their planets formed. Any Jovian planets were lost in the capture. As for the odds, well, it’s a big galaxy, things with astronomical odds against them still happen, and if it hadn’t happened here, we wouldn’t have bothered coming to look.” He looked at Sawyer, who nodded.

  “Thanks, Greg.”

  “That smells of the Anthropic Principal, that things are the way they are because we’re here to observe them,” Darwin said.

  “I know,” Sawyer said, “I’m holding my nose. But I’m really saying that we’re here—in this particular system—to observe them because things are the way they are.”

  “Kind of odd that it’s Sol’s closest neighbors, though, isn’t it?”

  Vukovich spoke up again. “And then some. The Alpha Centauri system has a high relative motion to Sol, its orbit around the galaxy is apparently inclined to ours. In a few hundred thousand years it won’t be anywhere near the solar system.”

  “So a coincidence in time as well as in space?”

  “Yeah. Spooky, isn’t it? Although we can’t rule out that the system was originally orbiting coplanar with ours and was recently perturbed by some other gravitational influence.”

  “How recently,” Sawyer asked.

  “At a minimum, tens of thousands of years or we’d probably be seeing what perturbed it. No more than a two or three million or it would be somewhere else. But it’s more probable it was in an inclined orbit to start with.”

  The biologists were not looking at all happy at this latest tidbit. Darwin muttered “Nothing is probable about this system.”

  Drake spoke again. “What about the geological anomalies?”

  “Those are more related to inconsistencies in dating, isotope ratios, things of that nature,” said Sawyer. She’d already gone over this with him, his question was for the benefit of the group. “Some of it could well be explained by different composition of the planetary nebula as compared to the Solar system. Let me just say that the crustal indications of tectonics and volcanism are more consistent with a much younger planet than the overall age of this system and the neutrino tomography results would suggest. As though the crust had been stirred up recently.”

  “What do you mean, recently? Same as Vukovich?”

  “Not by a few orders of magnitude. Within the last hundred million years, we’re still refining our dating markers. But this on a planet which should be close to five billion years old.”

  The biologists started whispering amongst themselves.

  “Giant meteor impact?” Drake said.

  “Well, sure, if there were a bunch of them, or a string like Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter last century. But again we’re left with the question of where that came from. And I would think the biologists wouldn’t be happy about a potential planet-sterilizing event that recently.”

  “Okay, thank you. That sounds like as good a segue to the biology discussion as any. Darwin?”

  “Thanks. Actually a planet-sterilizing event a hundred million years ago wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “What? Then why are we seeing anything more complex than algae?”

  “I’ll get to that. First I want to show a few comparisons. Botanical first.” He gestured to Singh. “Jennifer?”

  Singh began discussing the cellular structure of the local flora. They had cell walls made of cellulose, and the chlorophyll—it was chlorophyll, or something remarkably close to it—was contained in chloroplasts within the cells. All very similar to plant life on Earth. Sawyer had heard much of it already, and had never really been particularly interested in botany, so began to tune out the presentation. It wrapped up with a series of images. The first showed plants that didn’t look like any plant Sawyer—or Singh, for that matter—recognized, but whos
e microstructure was not especially unusual. The second series of images was a comparison of some local plants side by side with Earth plants, or sometimes fossils, which looked startlingly similar.

  “Of course there are plenty of species and even whole genera that don’t resemble anything we’ve found on Earth,” Singh reminded them, “but it is all things that wouldn’t particularly surprise us if we did find it, whether in some remote forest or in the fossil record. There’s nothing really alien. Convergent evolution and universal fundamentals of biochemistry are certainly possibilities, but we would expect to see more variation than we do.” She closed the final image she’d been showing. “Doctor Darwin?”

  “Thanks,” Darwin said. “Now I’ll show you a few animals. Ulrika should really be doing this, but it started with this.” He put a picture of the runny babbit up on the screen.

  “This is the one that got me wondering,” he said. “Let me show you some detailed comparisons.” A picture of an Earth rabbit came up on the screen beside the Centauri babbit.

  “Okay, gross morphology the same. Head, four legs, etc, etc. We all know how familiar the animals look in general, if not in detail. No six legged centaur-like creatures, no animals on wheels instead of legs, nothing really weird.”

  “What about the tree squids?” asked Tyrell.

  “Okay, I’ll grant that those are a bit odd, but they aren’t a huge leap from what Earth cephalopods are capable of. There are already species of octopus that can crawl from one tidal pool to another. Climbing into a banyan tree is conceivable.”

  Klaar nodded and raised her voice to add: “We have also found some very strange-looking insects and arachnids, but they are insects and arachnids, as best we can tell. Nothing with a body plan we don’t recognize, even if the details differ.”

  “But back to our furry friends,” Darwin said. “Let’s take a look at the skeletons.” On the screen, the two animals were replaced by their skeletons. “Remarkably similar, aren’t they? Now, amazing as it is that two animals on planets light years apart would both have evolved skeletons, made of bone, with remarkably similar microstructure and properties, it gets better.”

  Darwin touched a key and the skeletons on the screen disarticulated, all the bones separating from each other just a bit. The neck areas of both animals magnified. “See the neck vertebrae? Seven of them in the rabbit, seven in the babbit. That number seven goes for just about every mammal on Earth. It also goes for just about every mammal-like creature we examined here.”

  He touched another button. The neck area shrunk back to normal size and the skulls expanded. “But wait, there’s more. When paleontologists find a skull, one of the things they look at is the way the jawbone connects to the rest of the skull, the bones around what in us is the ear area, at the various foramen—holes—in the skull. They are what distinguish a mammal skull from a reptile from a dinosaur.” At Darwin’s touch, a series of labels appeared with lines pointing to features on both skulls. “If this skull,” he pointed to the Centauran babbit’s, “was found on Earth, any biologist or paleontologist would identify it as a mammal’s. A previously undescribed species and even genus of mammal, but a mammal.”

  Darwin cleared the babbit/rabbit pictures from the screen and started a slide show showing pairs of animals, much as Singh had done with the plants. “Look, birds. Same feathers, same bones, same gizzard. A few minor differences, the birds here tend to have longer tails, but not all of them. Nothing inconsistent with having descended from Archaeopteryx or something like him, just like every bird on Earth.” More pictures. “The same goes for the invertebrates. Those tree squids mentioned earlier, for example. Similar body plan to Earthly cephalopods. There’s a cousin to the coelacanth swimming in the ocean, as well as plenty of fish. Oh, no species we particularly recognized, we only did limited sampling, but nothing that would seem out of place in Earth’s oceans.”

  Darwin paused, then waved a hand and shrugged. “The list goes on. Unfortunately we lost the DNA sequencer, but we can say that the life here is more or less consistent with life on Earth. And I don’t just mean any life on Earth, but current life. As best we can tell without the sequencer, the way life forms here compare with Earth life forms is consistent with the two having followed an almost identical evolutionary path for about the same length of time. That is highly improbable, to put it mildly.”

  “Well, the planet is about the same age as Earth, give or take a few hundred million years,” said Tyrell.

  ”Yes, but lot can happen in a few hundred million years, and unless there are forces in play we don’t understand yet, that doesn’t explain billions of years of biological parallelism,” Darwin said. “But there’s something else.”

  “Oh?”

  “Earth’s history of complex multicellular lifeforms goes back more than half a billion years. From studying the fossil record, incomplete though it is, we’ve built up a pretty extensive catalog of species, genus, even entire phyla of plants and animals that went totally extinct at different stages of Earth’s history.”

  “Like dinosaurs,” Tyrell said.

  “Like dinosaurs,” Darwin allowed, “except for birds. But also ammonites, trilobites, gorgonopsids, and so on. Now, Sawyer mentioned a planet-sterilizing event of a hundred million years ago—”

  “Could have been less,” Sawyer broke in. “Could have been a bit more. Call it ninety plus or minus forty million for now.”

  “Okay, close enough for my point. The thing is, despite the fact that all the life that we’ve found here bears some resemblance to Earth life, none of it bears any resemblance to anything that went extinct on Earth prior to ninety million—give or take forty—years ago. For that matter, we haven’t found anything that strongly resembles Earth life which evolved more recently than about fifty million years ago. It’s like somebody, ninety million years ago, took a snapshot of Earth’s lifeforms and set them up here, and they’ve evolved their own way since. Although by our biology estimates the number is more like sixty or seventy million years ago.”

  “Dinosaurs?” asked Tyrell.

  “We haven’t found any, not counting the birds, so maybe it was less than sixty-five million years ago.”

  “No, I mean,” Tyrell paused, blushing slightly. “This is going to sound silly.”

  “You’re wondering if intelligent dinosaurs could have done all this, right Fred?”

  “Well, yes. I said it would sound silly.”

  Darwin started to shake his head, then stopped and said “Nope. Actually we’d already kicked that idea around. But there’s never been any evidence on Earth of intelligent dinosaurs, and—”

  “Absence of evidence—”

  “—is not evidence of absence. Yes, you’re right, maybe we just haven’t looked in the right place yet. But then why aren’t there dinosaurs here? And why let themselves get wiped out if they were capable of transplanting an entire ecosystem across four light years?”

  “Sixty-five million years ago it could have been a lot more than four light years,” said Vukovich. “That’s about a quarter of a rotation around the galaxy, and at Alpha Centauri’s current inclination it would have been well out of the galactic plane. Although we don’t know if that’s always been the case.”

  “Okay, now that’s too weird. Does anything support the idea that Centauri’s motion changed recently, so that it’s in an inclined orbit now but wasn’t always?”

  “Yee..es,” Vukovich said. “I’m not really happy with that hypothesis, because I’m not sure how you’d do that with a multiple star system without messing up the planet orbits, but I’m not going to rule it out without running the math.” He paused as if thinking, then continued. “There are some simulations that suggest the few thousand nearby stars may have been clustered together about then, before diverging and converging as they orbit the galactic core. The galaxy isn’t a rigid disk.”

  There was a low murmur of conversation as several of the crew made comments to each other. Darwin caught
Sawyer making eye contact with Drake.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Sawyer watched the Commodore intently as he ahem-ed for attention and then raised his voice.

  “Suppose it were an act of God?” Drake said. The result was several seconds of dead silence, disturbed only by the whisper of fans in the life support system, as everyone turned their gazes to stare at him. Whatever she had been expecting him to say, this wasn’t it.

  “All right,” he continued, “don’t all look at me like I dropped a turd in the punchbowl. You know that will be what every religious fundamentalist on the planet will be saying when word of this gets out. Creation, intelligent design, God did it, Allah’s will, and so on.”

  “You’re right,” Sawyer said. “Just what the planet needs, another excuse for religious fanaticism. We need to keep it quiet.”

  “Keep it quiet?” Darwin exclaimed. “How? I can see it now: ‘Gee folks, how was your trip to Alpha Centauri? What are those life-bearing planets like?’ ‘Oh, that was a mistake, there’s nothing there.’ ‘It took you a month to figure that out?’” He shook his head. “Yeah, that will go over well.”

  “Okay, we let it out a bit at a time,” Sawyer said. “Just the objective facts, not our interpretations. It could be convergent evolution.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Drake said, resuming control of the conversation. “If it’s not just incredible coincidence, and it wasn’t intelligent dinosaurs, and it wasn’t God, then who was it?” Again the meeting area in the hub grew quiet. Sawyer thought she heard somebody whisper “holy shit.”

  “Think about it, people.” Drake continued, although it was clear most of them were doing just that. “If what Sawyer is saying about water and everything else is correct, then these planets were deliberately modified. Terraformed. On a scale we can only dream of. Sixty-five or a hundred million years ago, somebody or something terraformed these planets and seeded them with life from Earth . . . or perhaps they seeded Earth too.”