by Lucy Hawking
On the overhead screens, Annie and Emmett watched an animation of what was happening to Homer as he approached Mars. The atmosphere in the room was electric: groups of people stood nervously by, hoping that their robot had made it to the start of his mission.
It is very difficult to land on Mars, Eric explained. Mars has a thin atmosphere, which means it doesn’t provide the natural braking that the Earth’s atmosphere gives returning spacecraft. This meant Homer would be hurtling toward the surface of Mars at a great speed, and they would have to hope that all his systems worked properly to help him slow down; otherwise he would just crash down and end up as a pile of broken parts millions of miles away, with no one to fix him.
As Homer approached Mars’s atmosphere, everyone was glued to the screens. To one side was a digital clock counting the time Homer had spent in space. Next to it, another time was displayed in UTC, the time system used by all space agencies to coordinate with one another and with their missions in space.
“We’re watching the EDL now,” called out a serious-looking man wearing a headset.
“What’s that?” asked Annie.
“Entry, descent, and landing,” Emmett told her in a rather superior voice. “Really, Annie, I thought you would have done some reading before we came, to get the most out of the experience.”
In reply, Annie stomped firmly on Emmett’s foot.
“Ouch! Ouch! Susan!” he cried. “She’s hurting me again!”
Susan gave her daughter a fierce look. Annie moved quietly away from Emmett to stand next to her dad. She slipped her hand into his. He was chewing his lip and frowning.
“Do you think Homer’s landed?” she whispered.
“Hope so,” he said, smiling down at her. “I mean, he’s only a robot, but he could send us some really useful information.”
“Atmospheric entry!” said the control operator.
When Homer—shaped a bit like an upside-down spinning top—broke through Mars’s atmosphere, they saw the bright stream of flames erupting in his wake. The room burst into applause.
“Peak heating rate in one minute and forty seconds,” warned the controller. “Possible plasma blackout.” The room seemed to tense up automatically, as if everyone was holding their breath.
“Plasma blackout!” said the controller. “We have plasma blackout! Expect signal to resume after two minutes.”
Annie squeezed her dad’s hand.
He squeezed back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We know this happens sometimes. It’s due to friction in the atmosphere.”
The clock on the wall ticked away as everyone in the room stared at it, waiting for contact to resume. Two minutes went by, then three, then four. People started to mutter to one another as the anxiety in the room mounted.
“We are receiving no signal from Homer,” said the controller. The screens showing Homer’s descent had frozen as well. “We have lost the signal to Homer!” said the controller. Red lights started flashing around the room.
“What’s going on?” whispered Annie.
Her dad shook his head. “I’m worried now,” he replied. “There’s a possibility that Homer’s communication system melted during entry.”
“Does that mean Homer is dead?” asked Emmett loudly. Several people turned around to glare at him.
The controller had taken off his headset and was mopping his brow miserably. If Homer had no communication system, they had no way of knowing what had happened to their clever robot. He might have landed, he might have crashed. He might find evidence of life on Mars, but no one on Earth would ever know because he would never be able to send a signal to tell them.
“The Mars monitoring satellite shows no trace of Homer!” someone shouted, sounding like they were beginning to panic. “The monitoring satellite cannot locate Homer. Homer has vanished from all systems.”
But then, just a few seconds later, Homer was back again. “We have a signal!” exclaimed another man as his computer came to life. “Homer approaching the surface of Mars. Homer deploying his parachute.”
On the TV screen they saw a parachute billowing out from behind Homer as the little robot swayed down to the planet’s surface.
“Homer has landing legs prepared for touchdown. Homer has landed! Homer has reached the north polar region of Mars.”
Some people cheered—but Eric didn’t. He looked puzzled.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Annie whispered to him. “Homer is okay.”
“Good, but weird,” said Eric, frowning. “It doesn’t make sense to me. Why did Homer lose the signal completely for so long and then bring it back? And why wasn’t he showing up on the monitoring satellite? It’s like he just disappeared for a few minutes. It’s very strange. I wonder what is happening right now….”
“So,” said George, who was now lying across the branch, “what’s this got to do with aliens?”
“Nothing,” said Emmett from below. “She doesn’t realize it was just a normal technical malfunction and she is making it into too big a deal.”
“That’s because you don’t know the rest of the story,” said Annie darkly. “You don’t know what happened next.”
“What?” said Emmett. “What happened next?”
“It’s not for crybabies and sneaks,” said Annie grandly. “It’s a story for big kids. So why don’t you go inside and write some computer code while I talk to my friend.”
“Can you do that?” George asked Emmett. “Can you really write computer code?”
“Oh yeah!” said Emmett enthusiastically. “Anything you need on a computer, I can do it. I’m the code wizard. I applied for a job at a software firm a few months ago—I sent them some more information for an online version of my space shuttle simulator. They were going to give me a job. But then they found out I’m only nine years old. So they didn’t.”
“So you’re some kind of genius?” said George.
“Yup,” agreed Emmett happily. “You can try my simulator if you like. It shows you what it’s like to go up in a spaceship. It’s really cool. If you tell me the story about aliens, I’ll let you both play.”
“We don’t want to,” said Annie, just as George was thinking he’d love to have a try. “So get lost!”
At the foot of the tree, Emmett burst into noisy sobs just as Susan and Eric came out onto the veranda.
“Tree time is over,” called Susan. “And you three are coming in for dinner.”
Chapter 5
George was so tired after his long journey that he nearly fell asleep while brushing his teeth. He staggered into the room he was sharing with Emmett, who was messing around on his computer, launching spaceships on his simulator.
“Hey, George,” he said. “Do you want to fly the space shuttle? Look, it’s really just like it is. I’ve put in all the time commands too, and it tells you what’s happening.”
“T minus seven minutes and thirty seconds,” said a robotic voice from Emmett’s computer. “Orbiter access arm retracted.”
George was so exhausted he could hardly speak. “No, Emmett,” he said. “I think I’ll just…” And he fell asleep to the countdown of a spaceship launch.
The commands from the space-shuttle launch must have wormed their way into George’s brain because he had a strange dream. He dreamed he was in the commander’s seat on the shuttle, responsible for flying the huge great spacecraft into space. It felt like being strapped to the top of an enormous rocket and sent up into the heavens. As they flew into the darkness of space, he thought he saw stars flashing at him through the shuttle window. In the darkness outside, they suddenly looked very bright and very close. One of them seemed to be zooming toward him, shining a bright light directly into his face, so close and so brilliant that—
He woke up with a start and found himself in an unfamiliar bed with someone shining a light in his face.
“George!” the figure hissed. “George! Get up! It’s an emergency!”
It was Annie in her pajamas.
“Bleeeuurgh!” exclaimed George, shielding his eyes from the light as she threw back his duvet and grabbed him by the arm.
“Downstairs,” she said. “And super quietly. It’s our only chance to escape Emmett! Come on!”
George blundered after her, his mind still reeling from his strange dream about flying the space shuttle. He tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, where Annie opened the door and led him out onto the veranda. She shone her flashlight on a piece of paper.
The piece of paper had drawings all over it. It looked like this:
“This is it?” said George, blinking. “This is the alien message? They sent it to you on a piece of school notebook paper?”
“No, twit,” Annie told him. “Of course they didn’t. I got this through Cosmos! I copied it from his screen.”
“Cosmos?” George exclaimed. “But he doesn’t work.”
“I know!” said Annie. “But I didn’t finish the story.”
After Homer had landed on Mars, the robot was supposed to start doing all sorts of things, like taking readings of the Martian weather, looking for water in the soil samples and other signs that there might be some form of bacterial life on Mars.
But he wouldn’t do any of them. The robot seemed to have gone crazy. He refused to respond to any signals from Earth; he just drove around in circles or threw scoopfuls of mud into the air.
Even though he wasn’t replying to their signals, Homer continued sending messages, which turned out to be pictures of his tires and other useless information. From Earth, they could see the robot—but only sometimes—via the monitoring satellite that orbited Mars and sent back pictures. Once, Annie said, her dad had been watching Homer and he’d picked up something really odd on the satellite pictures. He said that if he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that Homer was waving his robotic arm at him. It was almost like Homer was trying to attract his attention.
Eric, Annie said, was getting really stressed out by all this. Lots of people wanted to know what Homer had found on Mars and what he was doing up there. But so far they had nothing to show except a robot behaving in a very silly fashion.
It was putting the Global Space Agency in an awkward position. Homer was an extremely expensive robot, and it took many people to build, launch, and operate him. He was an important part of the new space program, since he was meant to blaze the trail for human beings to go out and live on a different planet. So the fact that he didn’t seem to work properly meant that those who weren’t in favor of the space program or sending astronauts far out into space could argue that this was all a big waste of time.
Homer’s bad behavior also meant that Eric wasn’t getting the information he was hoping for about possible life on Mars. It was breaking his heart to see his robot mess around on the red planet. Day by day he looked sadder and sadder. If Homer didn’t start cooperating soon, the mission would be abandoned and the robot would become just a pile of metal on a distant planet.
Annie couldn’t bear it. Her dad had been so excited and happy at the prospect of receiving Homer’s findings. She hated seeing him so upset. So she had a brilliant idea: She decided to get Cosmos out of retirement, just to see if she could make him work again.
“I realized that if we had Cosmos,” she told George as they stood outside under the starry sky, “we could just go off to Mars, fix the robot, and come home again without anyone even knowing. If we went when the monitoring satellite was on the other side of Mars, no one would even see us. I mean, we’d have to be careful not to leave a footprint or drop anything. That would be a bit of a disaster.”
“Hmm,” said George, still affected by his weird dream. “So what did you do?”
“I got Cosmos out of his secret hiding place.”
“Not that secret if you knew about it,” said George.
“And,” Annie went on, ignoring him, “I started him up.”
“And he actually worked?” George was wide awake now.
“Not really,” admitted Annie. “At least, only for a few seconds, and he didn’t say anything. But this is what I saw on his screen.” She waved the paper at George. “It was there—honest, it was. It was a message. I checked the sender ID and it said: unknown. For message location, it said: extraterrestrial. Then Cosmos died and I couldn’t start him up again.”
“Wow!” said George. “Did you tell Eric?”
“Of course,” said Annie. “And he tried to start Cosmos up again but couldn’t. I showed him the message, but he didn’t believe me.” She pouted. “He said I was making up stories—but I’m sure Homer really is waving to us and has something he wants to tell us. But my dad just insisted that Homer doesn’t work because he had a bad atmospheric entry and that this message—if Cosmos received it at all—is just something to do with Cosmos being broken.”
“But that’s really boring of him!” remarked George.
“No, he’s just being a scientist. It’s like Emmett said,” admitted Annie. “Most people believe there is only some form of bacteria out there and no real aliens. But I think…”
“What do you think?” asked George, looking up at the stars.
“I think,” said Annie firmly, “that someone out there is trying to get in touch with us. I think someone is using Homer to attract our attention, and because we’re just ignoring him, they’ve started sending us messages instead. Only we can’t pick them up because Cosmos isn’t working.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ve got to go out there,” said Annie, “and see for ourselves. But first we have to fix Cosmos. We need to see if the aliens are sending us any more messages! And then, maybe, we can send one back…”
“How would we do that?” asked George. “I mean, how can we send a message that they will understand? And even if we knew how to send it, what would we say? And in what language? They’ve sent us the message in pictures—it must be because they don’t know how to speak to us.”
“I think we’re going to say, Leave our lovely robot alone, you pesky aliens!” said Annie, looking fierce. “You’re messing with the wrong civilization! Pick on someone else!”
“But we want to know who they are and where they come from,” protested George. “We can’t just say, Get lost, aliens, and never find out who sent the message.”
“What about, Come in peace and then go home?” said Annie. “So we find out who they are, but they’re not allowed to come to Earth if they have evil intentions.”
“Yeah?” said George. “Who’s going to stop them? They could land here and be like huge scary machines who stamp us into the ground, just like we do with ants.”
“Or,” said Annie, her eyes shining in the light from the flashlight, “they might be teeny-weeny, like little wriggly bacteria under a microscope. Only they don’t realize how large we are and so we don’t even notice when they arrive.”
“They might have fourteen heads and dribble slime,” said George ghoulishly. “We’d notice that!”
They heard a creaking noise, followed by footsteps on the stairs. A bleary-eyed Eric came out onto the veranda.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“George couldn’t sleep,” said Annie quickly. “Because of the jet lag. So I was just, um, getting him a glass of water.”
“Hmm,” said Eric, his hair sticking up all over the place. “Upstairs with you both now.”
George sneaked into the room he shared with Emmett and hopped back into bed, but not before he’d taken Annie’s flashlight from her. He was wide awake now, so he got out his copy of The User’s Guide and turned to the chapter, “Getting in Touch with Aliens.”
* * *
THE USER’S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
GETTING IN TOUCH WITH ALIENS
If aliens are really out there, will we ever get to meet them?
The distances between the stars are staggeringly great, so we still can’t be sure that a face-to-face encounter will someday take place (assuming the aliens have faces!). But even
if extraterrestrials never visit our planet or receive a visit from us, we might still get to know one another. We might still be able to talk.
One way this could happen is by radio. Unlike sound, radio waves can move through the empty spaces between the stars. And they move as fast as anything can move—at the speed of light.
Almost fifty years ago some scientists worked out what it would take to send a signal from one star system to another. It surprised them to learn that interstellar conversation wouldn’t require superadvanced technology like you often see in science-fiction movies. It’s possible to send radio signals from one solar system to another with the type of radio equipment we could build today. So the scientists stood back from their chalkboards and said to themselves: If this is so easy, then no matter what aliens might be doing, they’d surely be using radio to communicate over large distances. The scientists realized that it would be a perfectly logical idea to turn some of our big antennae to the skies to see if we could pick up extraterrestrial signals. After all, finding an alien broadcast would instantly prove that there’s someone out there, without the expense of sending rockets to distant star systems in the hope of discovering a populated planet.
Unfortunately, this alien eavesdropping experiment, called SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has so far failed to find a single, sure peep from the skies. The radio bands have been discouragingly quiet wherever we’ve looked, aside from the natural static caused by such objects as quasars (the churning, high-energy centers of some galaxies) or pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars).
Does that mean that intelligent aliens, able to build radio transmitters, don’t exist? That would be an astounding discovery, because there are surely at least a million million planets in our Milky Way Galaxy—and there are one hundred thousand million other galaxies! If no one is out there, we are stupendously special—and dreadfully alone.
Well, as SETI researchers will tell you, it’s entirely too soon to conclude that we have no company among the stars. After all, if you’re going to listen for alien radio broadcasts, not only do you have to point your antenna in the right direction, but you also need to tune to the right spot on the dial, have a sensitive enough receiver, and be listening at the right time. SETI experiments are like looking for buried treasure without a map. So the fact that we haven’t found anything so far isn’t surprising. It’s like digging a few holes on the beach of a South Pacific island and coming up with nothing but wet sand and crabs. You shouldn’t immediately conclude that there’s no treasure to be found.