Things even more mysterious, events, could be observed on Quinta. The electromagnetic noise, emitted unequally from many places on the planet, intensified considerably, as if hundreds of maxwellian transmitters had been turned on at once. At the same time, the radiation in the infrared increased, with small flashes at the centers. These could be mirrors focusing sunlight for power plants. But then it turned out that the thermal component of that emission was not great. The spectra of the flashes were not copies of the spectrum of Zeta (as they would have been in the case of reflection), nor did they resemble the spectra of nuclear explosions. Meanwhile the radio noise continued to grow—shortwave and medium-wave, in many bands. The meter-length emission had the look of being modulated. This produced great excitement, particularly when someone garbled the news to the effect that the radiation was directed like radar—or, in other words, that the planet had already noticed the Eurydice. The astrophysicists ignored this rumor: no kind of radar could have detected the ship near the collapsar.
The mood at zero hour was jubilant. Beyond all doubt Quinta was inhabited by a civilization so advanced technologically that it had entered the Cosmos not merely in small craft but with a power able to lift oceans into space.
Preparations for takeoff of the scout ship took place in an altered orbit, in the relatively calm aphelion of Hades. The piping of the piezoelectric indicators, showing the constant change in stresses in the ribs and girders of the hull, died away. At the same time, on the screens of the takeoff control center—blank until now—there appeared at an angle a glowing, spiral arm of the galaxy, and with good will and a little imagination one could pick out, among the whitish, motionless swirls of stars and the dark dust clouds, Zeta Harpyiae. Its planets were not optically visible. The technicians readied the Hermes for unmooring.
In the storage bays at the stern, cranes swiveled; the flanges of the pipes with which the Eurydice filled the hypergolic fuel tanks of the scout ship shuddered under the pressure of the pumps. The head staff checked the systems—drive, navigation, air control, the dynatrons—once through DEUS and once without, employing parallel lines. One by one, the numbered units announced that their programs were ready; radio range-finders and antennas protruded and moved like the horns of a giant snail; the deep bass of the turbines that pumped oxygen to the tunnels in the hold of the Hermes sent subtle vibrations through its dock-shaped bed. During all this antlike bustle, the billion-ton Eurydice slowly turned her stern in the direction of Zeta Harpyiae like a cannon about to fire.
The crew of the Hermes parted with the Commander and their best friends. There were too many people on board the mother ship for everyone to shake hands. Then Ter Horab, with those who were able to leave their stations, escorted the crew of the Hermes and stood in the cylindrical passage between the sections while, after the closing of the large dock gate, the small personnel hatches were shut and, as on a launching chute, the Hermes began to move gradually, white as snow, pushed inch by inch by hydraulic jacks, since the hundred-and-eighty-thousand-ton mass, though weightless, preserved every bit of its inertia.
The technicians of the Eurydice, with the biologists Davis and Vahradian, were already putting the crew of the Hermes to sleep—a sleep that would last many years, but without ice or hibernation. Instead they were subjected to embryonization, a process in which people returned to a life before birth—a fetal existence, or at least strikingly similar: no breath, underwater.
Man's first small steps into space had shown how very terrestrial a creature he was, how poorly adapted to the powerful forces required by the crossing of great distances as rapidly as possible. Violent acceleration crushed the body, especially the lungs, which were filled with air; the force flattened the rib cage and stopped the circulation of the blood. If the laws of nature could not be bent, then one had to change the astronauts to conform to them. Embryonization accomplished this.
First the blood was replaced with an oxygen-carrying fluid that also possessed other properties of blood, from coagulability to the immunological functions. This fluid, white as milk, was onax. After the body's temperature was lowered to that of hibernating animals, closed vessels were surgically reopened: vessels through which the fetus at one time had exchanged blood with the placenta in the mother's womb. Though the heart continued to work, respiration ceased in the lungs, which collapsed and filled with onax. When there was no air remaining in either the rib cage or the intestines, the unconscious man was immersed in a liquid as incompressible as water. The astronaut then was locked inside an embryonator, a container in the shape of a two-meter torpedo that kept the body above freezing and supplied it with nutritive substances and oxygen. Onax was pumped into the organism by artificial vessels through the navel.
A man thus prepared could withstand tremendous pressures without harm, like bathypelagic fish which were not crushed at depths of miles beneath the ocean because the outside pressure equaled the pressure within their tissues. The liquid in the embryonator was kept, therefore, at hundreds of atmospheres per square centimeter of body surface. Each such container on the ship was held in swinging suspension by pincers. The astronauts lay in their armored cocoons like giant pupas, in such a way that acceleration and deceleration hit them always chest-first. The bodies, now more than 85 percent water and onax, already airless, were as compression-resistant as water. Thanks to this, there was no problem in maintaining a constant acceleration of 20 g's, at which a body weighed two tons, and moving the ribs to breathe would have been a task beyond even an athlete. But the embryonized did not breathe, and the limit of their durability for stellar flight was fixed only by the delicate molecular structure of the cells.
When ten hearts in full embryonizative compression were beating only a few times a minute, DEUS assumed charge of the unconscious, and the people of the Eurydice returned on board. The operators then disconnected the computers of the mother ship from the Hermes. Except for the dead cables, nothing now joined the two craft.
The Eurydice ejected the scout ship from her wide-open stern, which was ringed with the giant plates of an expanding photon mirror. Her steel claws, extending, tore away the useless cables like threads and thrust the hull of the Hermes into the void. Then the Hermes' side engines glowed with pale ionic flame. But the impulse was too weak to move it from its place; such an enormous mass could not acquire speed suddenly. The Eurydice drew in her catapults and closed the stern, and everyone observing the takeoff from her control room breathed a sigh of relief: DEUS, correct to the fraction of a second, took over. The hypergolic boosters of the Hermes, silent until now, fired. To build impetus, the batteries fired in sequence. At the same time, the ionic engines blazed full-force. Their blue, transparent flame mixed with the blinding glare of the boosters; the hull, wrapped in shimmering heat, moved smoothly, evenly, into the eternal night. In the darkened control room, the reflection from the screens made the faces of those who stood by the Commander deathly pale.
The Hermes, sending toward them a lengthening tail of steady flame, grew more distant as its speed increased. When the telemeters indicated the necessary distance, and when at the edge of the field of vision an empty cylinder tumbled end over end in free-fall (up to the last minute it had connected the Hermes and the Eurydice, and now, shot by the starting salvos, it flew off into the darkness), the mirror of the billion-ton ship locked in place. Through the central opening the blunt cone of an emitter slowly emerged; it flashed once, twice, three times, until a column of light stabbed space and hit the Hermes. In both control rooms of the Eurydice there was a triumphant cheer and—it must be confessed—an exclamation of surprise, too, that the thing had gone off so well. The Hermes soon vanished from the visual monitors. The screens showed only dwindling, glowing circles, as if an invisible giant had lit a cigarette among the stars and blown rings of white smoke. Finally these rings fused into a trembling point that was the mirror of the scout ship reflecting the Eurydice s driving laser.
Ter Horab returned to his cabin before
the scene was over. He had seventy-nine difficult hours ahead of him—of sidereal manipulations with the gracer of the Orpheus, to create a temporal port in the gravitational resonances. And then to enter it—or, rather, to become submerged in it—since this meant being cut off completely from the outside world.
The ignition order, sent to the Orpheus, took two days to reach it, and it was in that time that the several strange phenomena took place on Quinta. Up until the moment that their instruments were totally blinded, the astrophysicists tuned into the entire galactic emission from the region of the Harpy. The spectra of the Alpha, Delta, and Zeta stars in no way changed, which was an important test of the quality of the reception of Quinta. The radiation reaching the Eurydice from the planet was filtered, and the different exposures were compared, superimposed, and sharpened by computer cascade amplifiers. At the highest visual magnification, the Zeta system was a spot that a match head held at arm's length would cover.
The attention of the planetologists was focused, naturally, on Quinta. Its spectro- and holograms created not so much an image of the planet as a computer guess. Because the source of information was diverging photons spread out erratically over the whole spectrum of radiation, there was at the observatory on the Eurydice—just as at the observatories on Earth long ago, with the first telescopes—no agreement on the critical question of what was actually seen and what only seemed to be seen.
The mind of man, like any system processing information, could not draw a sharp line between certainty and conjecture. Observation was hindered by Quinta's sun, Zeta, by the gas plume of its largest globe, Septima, and by the strong emission of the stellar background. So far, it was found that in many physical respects Quinta did resemble Earth. The atmosphere contained 29 percent oxygen; there was plenty of water vapor and about 60 percent nitrogen. The white polar caps, having a high albedo, could be seen even from the vicinity of Earth's sun. The ring of ice must have arisen during the flight of the Eurydice, or at least reached the proportions that made it visible. Now, viewed from the cosmic neighborhood, the artificial nature of Quinta's radio intensity was beyond question. Discharges from atmospheric storms could not possibly have been a factor. In radio intensity in the shortwave range, Quinta equaled the corresponding emission of its own sun. The same thing had happened with Earth after the global spread of television.
The results of the observations made shortly before the plunge into the gravitational harbor were a shock. Ter Horab immediately summoned the experts. The council's only line of action was to diagnose as quickly as possible what was taking place on the planet and to send that message after the scout ship. The message, coded in the alphabet of high-energy quanta, would overtake the Hermes and its unconscious crew. DEUS would receive the message and convey it to the people upon their reanimation at the edge of the Zeta system. The stellar message was to be encoded so that only DEUS could read it. Caution was indicated: the changes on Quinta were alarming.
1) Several series of brief flashes above the thermosphere and ionosphere of the planet had been recorded, also between it and its moon—about two hundred thousand kilometers from Quinta. The flashes lasted thirty to forty nanoseconds. Spectrally, they matched the solar emission, with the radiation cut off in the infrared and ultraviolet.
2) After each of these series of flashes, which took many hours, there appeared on the face of the planet, in the intertropical zone, dark streaks on both sides of the ice ring.
3) At the same time, the emission of approximately meter-length waves increased, exceeding all previously observed maxima, while the emission of the southern hemisphere weakened.
4) Immediately before the council met, a bolometer aimed at the center of the planet's face registered a sharp drop in temperature on the order of 180 degrees Kelvin, with a slow return to equilibrium. The cold spot had an area equal to Australia. At first the cloud cover vanished above the spot, surrounding it on all sides with a very bright embankment of clouds; before the clouds returned, the bolometer located the "cold source" at a single point in the exact center of the spot. Thus the sudden cooling had expanded, from a source of unknown nature, in a circular front.
5) On Quinta's large moon there appeared—in the dark hemisphere, not facing the sun—a point flash that flickered—moved independently of the motion of the moon's surface. As if, just above the crust, through an arc of one-ten-thousandth of a second, a flame traveled, made of atomic plasma at a temperature of a million degrees Kelvin.
6) As the council began deliberating, the cold spot disappeared beneath the clouds, and then the cloud cover obscured the surface of Quinta to an extent unprecedented: 92 percent of the planet's face.
The opinions of the specialists, as one might have guessed, were divided. The first hypothesis that leaped to mind—of nuclear explosions, whether as tests or as warfare—could be discarded without further discussion: the flashes had nothing in common spectrally either with explosions of the uranides or with thermonuclear reactions. The exception was the plasmatic spark on the moon, but its thermonuclear spectrum was continuous. One thought of an open hydrogen-helium reactor in a magnetic vise. To the nucleonics people the purpose of such a reactor was a mystery.
The flashes in space nearer the planet could come from specially tuned lasers hitting metallic objects—nickel and magnetite meteors, possibly—or from the collision of bodies of high iron, nickel, and titanium content, if they collided head-on and at speeds on the order of 80 to 100 km/sec. But neither could one rule out as source converter mirrors (which absorbed a portion of the sun's waves) exploding because of malfunctions.
The council got into a heated debate; the experts disagreed with one another. There was talk of climate control with the aid of very large photoconverters, and of photoelectric cells—which, however, had no connection with the focus of cold at the equator. But the most astounding thing was the result of the Fourier analysis done on the entire radio spectrum of Quinta. All trace of modulation disappeared, while at the same time the power of the transmitters increased. A radiolocation map of the planet showed hundreds of transmitters of white noise, which merged into shapeless blotches. Quinta was emitting noise on all wavelengths. The noise was either the scrambling of broadcast signals or a kind of coded communication concealed by the semblance of chaos—or else it was chaos indeed, created intentionally.
Ter Horab demanded an immediate answer to the question of what should be beamed to the Hermes within the next few hours, since all contact with it would be severed after that. More to the point: for what should the reconnoiterers prepare themselves, and how should they proceed once they were in the Zeta system?
The reconnaissance program had been worked out long before, but it was obviously impossible for them to have taken into account the phenomena just observed.
At first no one was anxious to take the floor. Finally the astromatician Tuym, as a spokesman for the advisory group SETI, said with undisguised reluctance that no helpful advice could be sent to the Hermes. They should list the facts, provide a hypothetical explanation, and rely on the independent judgment of the crew.
Ter Horab wanted to hear some hypotheses—it did not matter if they were mutually contradictory.
"Whatever the changes on Quinta are, they are not signals directed at us," said Tuym. "On that we are all agreed. Some believe that Quinta has noticed our presence and is preparing itself, in its own way, to receive the Hermes. This is not an idea based on rational data, it is simply—in my opinion—an expression of anxiety, or, to put it plainly, fear. A very old and primitive fear, which at one time gave rise to nightmares of cosmic invasion. I consider such an explanation of the phenomena to be nonsense."
Ter Horab preferred specifics. The people of the reconnaissance mission could decide for themselves whether they should be afraid or not. It was the mechanism of the new phenomena that interested him.
"Our astrophysicists have specific hypotheses. They can present them," replied Tuym, unruffled by the sarcasm of the Com
mander's words, since it was not directed at him.
"Who?" asked Ter Horab.
Tuym indicated Nystedt and Fecteau.
"The jumps in temperature and albedo could have been caused by a meteor swarm entering Quinta's system and colliding with artificial satellites. That could have produced the flashes," said Nystedt.
"How do you explain the similarity of the surface flashes to the spectrum of Zeta?"
"Some of the satellites of Quinta could be hunks of ice broken off from the outer edge of the ring. They would reflect the sunlight in our direction only at certain angles of incidence and reflection—randomly. They would be irregular solids, with different orbital moments."
"And what about the cold spot?" asked the Commander. "Who knows the possible ways it could have come about?"
"That's unclear—though we could come up with some natural mechanism…"
"An ad hoc hypothesis," Tuym remarked.
"I talked this over with the chemists," said Lauger. "An endothermic reaction could have taken place there. I'm not comfortable with such an oddity, I admit, but there are compounds that absorb heat when they react. The accompanying circumstances, however, point to something more dramatic."
"To what?" asked Ter Horab.
"An unnatural cause, though not necessarily one that has intention. For example—an accident in some enormous refrigeration devices, in cryogenic equipment. Like a fire in an industrial complex, but with a negative sign. But this doesn't seem very likely to me, either. I have no facts on which to base such an assertion—none of us have—but the very proximity in time of all these changes suggests that they are somehow connected."
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