Fundamental Force Episode Two

by Albert Sartison

  “You’re too fastidious. Anyway, why are you here? Or you just found yourself with nothing to do and felt like shooting the breeze?” He took his feet off the table and sat up straight, legs outstretched.

  “I brought you the report...”

  “Why didn’t you say so!”

  Chuck grabbed the holographic cube and instantly put it into the reader. His eyes scanned the text coming up on the screen. Ten seconds later and his unexpected spurt of enthusiasm had given way to fatigue.

  “See, Chuck? It’s just as I said. There’s no point relying on bureaucrats...”

  “But how was I supposed to know that the servers would be sealed?”

  “Hmm, how indeed... Maybe because they have to be sealed by law?”

  “The ship’s flight recorders were disabled, so the seals on the servers must have been broken. If we’re lucky, they can be done again by hand.”

  “That’s assuming they’ve been broken and the work was done by incompetent idiots. Idiots who have the money to buy three brand new ships, but not enough small change to bribe a desk jockey with access to the space agency’s seals.”

  “Human stupidity should never be underestimated.”

  “You’re right. I underestimated you.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Nevermind, forget it...” Chuck waved his hand in frustration.

  “No, no, no, hold on. You promised that if the check showed nothing, then we wouldn’t mention it again. Wasn’t that the deal?”

  “Yes, but...”

  “So the subject’s closed.”

  “Greg, you still don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “About the order from Stark himself. To carry on and ignore the results of the check.”

  “From Stark?”

  “I spoke with him personally. On a secure channel...”

  “That’s not funny, Chuck.”

  “No, really, I’m serious! So I’m sorry, but I’m still on the project. There won’t be time for yours. This has the highest priority, you know that. You can always call Stark and explain his mistake to him, of course. Maybe he’s just misunderstood something. He’s only the head of intelligence after all...”

  “Funny... All right, if the order’s from the very top... So what are you going to do? There’s no data on the flight mission. No log files. No radar data before we noticed them. No traces inside. The check produced absolutely nothing. Not a single lead. Besides your hunch, of course.”

  “There is a lead. All three ships are identically sterile. All three are being piloted fully automatically with no clear destination. All three have traces in the hold. None of the three are keeping log files.”

  “Every ship is sterile the first time it goes into space. It’s a requirement of the space agency’s acceptance protocol. Automatic piloting is not unusual, either. Just take all the traffic within the inner planets. Every tenth ship flies on autopilot and doesn’t even have a crew on board...”

  “And the traces in the hold?”

  “Well they’re maybe not that unusual, either. The log files... well that could just be a coincidence. It even happens here. One coincidence doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Greg, it would be more helpful if you could say what would happen if you thought there was something to my theory.”

  Greg pulled out the chair next to him.

  “Just don’t think I’m going to be a part of this nonsense,” he said, sitting down.

  “No, just answer the question...”

  “Well let’s say they’re flying together...”

  “In single file, you mean?”

  “I can see you’re brimming with intelligence today. A discernible pattern would be enough. A simultaneous lift-off, an initial route to a common point in space...”

  “First of all, if they’re hiding the fact that they’re in some way linked, they wouldn’t start out at the same time. Second, they don’t have to be flying towards a single common point to be working together...”

  “You think I’m arguing otherwise? You asked a question and I’m answering it.”

  “...and third, that was all before we noticed them. Until that point, we don’t have any information about them.”

  “I know, but allow me to quote a great military intelligence analyst – nothing is impossible to hide in our Universe.”

  “If you’re going to quote, then at least quote correctly. I never said that.”

  “Then what did you say?”

  “It doesn’t matter. But the fact that information is never lost is proved by physics.”

  “Oh well then, that’s pretty much case closed. We just need to find it. Am I quoting you correctly now?”

  “Let’s just get on with it.”

  Greg let out a sigh.

  “You know that shady goings-on like this are solved while they’re still fresh. The first few hours are like gold dust, but we can’t get back the time we’ve lost. Unfortunately we’re not all-seeing, either...

  “If there was something, then any tracks have probably been covered up already, and whoever’s covering the tracks has done it properly. Even the wise men can only see a weak link. And a weak link between two events translated into human language means... no link at all. In a nutshell, the train left and we were still standing on the platform. If the train ever existed at all.”

  “You’re right, I’ll let Stark know.”

  “You’re such a smartass! OK then, let’s hear your theory.”

  “I don’t have a theory, except that something’s not right.”

  “Not right... Maybe. The question is, does it have anything to do with military intelligence or is it just something trivial? It’s a crime at the very least, but neither option has anything to do with us.”

  “I bet you...”

  “Oh no, I’m not falling for all that again. It’ll be exactly the same – three months’ work and nothing to show for it. And I never got my prize, by the way.”

  “Well I didn't lose the bet either.”

  “Whatever... So what are you going to do about these ships?”

  Chuck thought about it and Greg stared at him intently for a few seconds, waiting for a response, then began examining his fingernails.

  “Seeing as there’s nothing else, I’ll resort to the help of chaos,” said Chuck finally, his voice unsure.

  “

  Well that sounds promising. You’re definitely unrivalled in that department.”

  6

  “Six, proceed five miles forward on course. Eight, slow down. You’re moving away from Seventeen again...”

  The captain, just like a photographer positioning models in his studio, was putting the group into an elaborate symmetrical formation.

  “Three, Five is complaining of interference from you.”

  “Skip, there’s something wrong with my accumulators. I can’t damp down the reactor for the time being.”

  “Roger. Slow down and stay three thousand behind. Distance to axis minimum eight hundred.”

  “Wilco, slow down, move away from axis. Doing it.”

  A holographic sphere hung in the air in front of the captain, looking like a transparent globe. Inside it shone the symbols for the ships. A light wave, reading off the next 400 km, flashed through the globe at one-second intervals. Moving at this speed, they would reach the edge of the astrosphere in the next few hours.

  The idea of forming an array of telescopes from the ships had come into Clive’s head once it became clear that the aliens were not going to respond to calls. Now, looking from the center of the star system, their formation took on the shape of a snowflake crystal. In the center, along the axis of movement, was the fat silhouette of a large cargo vessel carrying the telescope with the biggest mirror size. The other ships were along lines radiating from the center.

  “The planet looks strange, don’t you think?” said Steve, who was looking thoughtfully at the first photographs of the system’s third planet, his back to the audi
ence.

  The Academic Council was assembled in the conference hall and the astrophysicists were linked by radio to the other ships. The photographs were arriving in turn and the computer was assembling them into a single whole, adding more details to the image of 581-c all the time. The angular resolution of the array was considerably better than the first shots taken by a single telescope.

  “You get the impression it’s covered by a shroud,” said someone sitting at the far corner of the table.

  “Could it be an optical illusion?”

  Steve shook his head and gestured to the computer to return to the old shots taken just after they had arrived. Leafing through the whole stack from beginning to end, he shook his head again, this time with more conviction.

  “No... That can’t be it. The shots were taken at half-hour intervals. It’s the same whiteness on all of them. What do you think, Clive?”

  “I’m of the same opinion. If it’s some strange effect involving the reflection of the star from an ocean, for example, the planet would have shifted considerably along its orbit by now and the effect should have disappeared...”

  Everyone had had something to say, but one of the biologists had been studying the image in silence.

  “This entire system... It differs from ours in size, right?” he asked eventually. Steve signaled to the rest to keep quiet.

  “Right. Gliese 581 is what’s called a red dwarf...”

  In the depths of the hall, someone snickered mockingly. Steve nodded understandingly.

  “Uh-huh. I know, a ridiculous name. But that’s not the point. It still tells us something about it. Five Eight One is about a third of the size of our Sun. The radiant energy peak occurs in a different sector of the spectrum. The energy it radiates is also different...”

  “Which moves the habitable zone closer to the star...” added the biologist.

  “Naturally.”

  The biologist said nothing. It could be seen from his face that he was thinking furiously.

  “Please, think aloud. I think your thoughts are moving in the right direction,” said Clive.

  “Does closeness to the star have any influence on the orbital characteristics?” the biologist asked him.

  “The higher the orbital velocity, the lower the orbit. A year on 581-c is of much shorter duration than an Earth year.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The interaction of the atmosphere and the stellar wind could be somewhat different. Some kind of interesting constellations of interaction of the planet and stars’ magnetic fields... But there are no differences in principle.”

  “The orbital parameters are velocity, mean radius and eccentricity. In the rest, the orbit hardly differs from any other,” put in Steve.

  “Hmm...”

  “Is something worrying you?”

  “While we were still at home, my colleagues and I started on the basis of somewhat different orbital characteristics...”

  “I understand, but unfortunately 20 light years is a considerable distance. Our calculations of 581-c’s orbit had a high margin of error. As we can see from here, the actual error is even a little over the margin. But on the whole, our estimate of the system’s dynamics was correct.”

  The biologist sighed in disappointment.

  “I understand, but the problem is that the new data cast doubt on our previous calculations concerning the origin and development of life on the planet.

  “Biological systems react non-linearly to changes in environmental parameters, you see. Change one parameter – the brightness of the central star, the length of day – and the system simply collapses. And that is precisely what has happened. The frame conditions on the basis of the new data do not permit the biosphere of the planet to reach a stable balance.”

  “You doubt if life could have originated there at all?”

  “No, it could have originated easily enough. The problem appears later. There are several unbalanced feedbacks in the system that lead to the collapse of resources. In such conditions, biological life most likely flourished rapidly, exploded, you might say, but exhausted the resources more rapidly than it could adapt by evolution.”

  “What does that mean specifically?”

  “Specifically, it is hard for me to imagine how its biosphere managed to get beyond mosses and lichens. And even that seems too optimistic to me.

  “Look: firstly, Gliese 581 is too unstable by comparison with the Sun. Big spots keep appearing on it, considerably reducing its energy radiation. For life on the surface of the planet, this represents a serious problem, since it is difficult to adapt to chaotic and rapid changes of temperature and radiation. And now it also turns out that the planet is nearer to the star than we initially thought. Depending on the planet’s own rotation...”

  “Rotation!” exclaimed Steve.

  “What? Excuse me?”

  “Rotation! We forgot to introduce a corrective for the planet’s rotation around its own axis. 581-c is closer to the star than we initially assumed. Such a short distance inclines the planet to synchronous rotation. The initial impulse of its own rotation around its axis was damped out by tidal locking.

  “When the star’s planetary system formed, its planets possessed the impulse of their own rotation. Day gave way to night on them just as on Earth. But over time, 581-c lost this impulse and now has just one face turned toward the star all the time...”

  “Like the Moon to Earth...” commented Clive.

  “Like the Moon to Earth, absolutely right. Thank you, Clive, a good example.”

  “So there is no such concept as day and night on 581-c anymore?”

  “It looks that way. Well, at least on the basis of the laws of celestial mechanics. We can’t yet check what it’s actually like there. We shall learn when we fly nearer.”

  “Hmm... I don’t know what to say. We’ll have to put through a simulation using these data, but intuitively, I’d say this is more likely to add to the problems rather than reduce them. Because then it turns out that on one side of the planet there is an abundance of radiation, but on the other, the shadow side, there is an acute lack of it. And strong winds too. Unless... unless this shroud fulfils the role...”

  “...of a protective layer.”

  “Exactly! The planet may be wrapped in an opaque atmosphere. This serves as a blanket. It heats when it is cold and stops you being burned when it is hot. The rays are absorbed by the atmosphere and that is where the star’s energy is stored. It is in motion, levelling out the temperature difference by synchronous rotation. What’s more, it smooths out the variations in the intensity of the star’s radiation.”

  “This could solve the problem of habitability?”

  “Possibly, we’ll have to check our calculations.”

  “Could that explain why they are staying silent?”

  “How?”

  “The laser signals we’re sending can’t penetrate through the thick atmosphere and are lost in it. If it really is that dense.”

  The engineer snorted scornfully.

  “Nonsense! Forgive me, Steve, but...”

  “Not a problem.”

  “A dense atmosphere could damp out a signal, of course, but a developed civilization... They would have to take an interest in space, look into it... I rule out this possibility. Unless they are savages hiding in caves, of course.”

  “Maybe, who knows?”

  “Uh-huh, savages with the energy supply system of a Type 3 civilization.”

  “That’s right, we mustn’t forget that they too have a Dyson Sphere.”

  The computer received a photo from the last ship and completed its integration into the general picture. The image of 581-c once again became clearer, enriched with the new details. It could now be seen that the atmospheric shroud was not uniform. The hazy outlines of the first shots were now clearly divided into light and dark zones. Formations were apparent in the upper layers of the atmosphere vortex, spread all over the planet.

  A sharp soun
d like an electrical discharge was heard from the depths of the ship. Immediately afterwards, the ship shook as if it had been hit from outside and the whole hull shuddered. The Academic Council in the conference hall at once fell silent, listening in alarm to the sounds from the corridor.

  From the direction of the passage leading to the engine room, the aggressive sound of an electrical discharge was heard again. Again it was as if an invisible giant had hammered the ship’s plating with his fist. This time the impact was much stronger. It was such a shake-up that Steve and Clive, standing in front of the audience, visibly staggered, losing their balance. They both instinctively grabbed the table and stayed on their feet.

  “Attention, this is the captain!” rang out a voice from the loudspeaker above the table. “All on board sit down immediately and strap in. Emergency braking in 10 seconds!”

  The discharges continued one after the other, accompanied by powerful blows from outside. One of them was so strong that the bearing structure of the ship began to howl as if piteously praying for the beating to cease. The slowly growing roar of the reactor gathering power added itself to the incessant rumble of the impacts. A moment later, energy flowed to the engines. The thick-walled cables sang and the whole ship shook.

  By this time Steve was already sitting strapped into a seat with his back to the direction of motion. The force of inertia pushed his back into the soft upholstery and the ship began to decelerate. The power of the front engines increased rapidly, but then steadied. Negative acceleration was felt, but, surprisingly, it was too soft to cause any discomfort. By comparison with the emergency braking of the military drone, it was child’s play.

  Steve threw a glance at Clive, who was white as a sheet. He was sitting with his hands gripping the arms of his seat, his fingertips white from stress.

  Trying to shout over the rumble of the tooth-juddering blows, he yelled in horror:

  “

  Steve, what the hell is going on?”

  7

  “There’s a very rarefied tail stretching from the planet to the central celestial body.”