Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  “Don’t you like the Pigeon?”

  “The what?”

  “When I went down and trained with the astro-Fs, we started calling it that to annoy the French. It’s called a Pigeon because it goes somewhere and roosts for a while, but it’s always supposed to come back home.”

  “Well, it’s a better name than Apollo II. Less of a phony sound to it. And these things don’t look much like Apollos to me, anyway—too steep-sided and too big.”

  “Yep, I’ve seen the original Apollos in the Smithsonian. They’re really tiny. By comparison a Pigeon is huge.” She wriggled and stretched as much as she could, confined to the acceleration couch. “Geez, first mission since we lost Endeavour. I hope we have better luck with this one—I don’t think it’ll glide real far.”

  “Yeah, but these, uh, Pigeons are designed to float.”

  “Apollo II, this is Control,” a voice said through their earphones.

  “Roger, Launch Control, Pigeon is here and ready,” Lori said.

  “Excellent, Apollo II, we anticipate no delays, and we’ll be commencing countdown shortly. Please confirm the following checklist—”

  They did—everything was perfectly normal—and then watched and listened as the countdown proceeded. Aunt Lori always said the Pigeons were the beginning of the end for the “real” pilots because they were the first ships really designed to do everything either by remote control or by robotics; not even docking was to be manual. She grumbled that from the Pigeon forward, American astronauts were “passengers more than pilots.”

  Years later, when I began flying Pigeons, I disliked them intensely because it seemed to me that their computer system needed manual overriding much too often. No doubt someday the captains of later starships will wonder how anyone could put up with the living human pilots of the earlier starships.

  Chris and Lori endured the high-acceleration ride as first the Starbooster engine plus the upper stage carried them aloft, then the Starbooster peeled off to fly back to the Cape. A while later, they shut down the upper stage.

  “Made it to orbit this time,” Lori said. “That’s a bit more dignified.”

  Two more burns put them on course for the ISS. As they approached it, Chris whistled. “They’ve done a lot with the old joint since I was up here six years ago. The truss is done, the solar collectors are deployed . . . and so that’s the Big Can.”

  “We’re supposed to call it an HT.”

  “I bet you’re supposed to call this Pigeon an Apollo II, too.”

  “Maybe so, but if you were a woman you’d get tired of the number of male ground controllers who want to tell you that your Big Can is moving strangely, or that a couple of guys will be docking with your Big Can shortly, or to make sure I put my Big Can up high where people can see it.”

  Chris snorted. “I imagine those jokes do get old.”

  “Unh-hunh. Anyway, rumor has it that it’s pretty nice in there.”

  The Pigeon nosed gently into the docking module without Lori’s having to touch the controls. “Great system, but I’m not sure the union’s gonna like it,” she muttered. “Well, let’s get inside.”

  They had unshipped the FSRT and were just in process of getting to know the rest of the crew—two cosmonauts, a Japanese astronaut, and an astro-F—when the chime that indicated a high-priority message sounded.

  “Probably something that will prevent dinner,” Peter Denisov grumbled, going to the radio. “Preventing dinner seems to be their highest priority down there.” Between Mir and ISS, Denisov had almost four years in space; doctors were constantly poking at the pudgy red-haired man to see how many things differed between him and the rest of the human race.

  He talked with them for a long time, earphone clapped to his ear. Mostly what he said was “No,” and “It can’t be,” and “I don’t believe it.” Once he asked if this was some kind of prank. Finally he hung up, still denying everything—whatever everything was.

  By that time the room had fallen silent. Tatiana Haldin, the ranking officer on board, finally asked, “Peter Mikhailovich, what are they telling you on the radio?”

  “It’s a prank. It must be a prank.”

  She shrugged. “Unless they ordered us to do something dangerous, I think we should comply.”

  He wouldn’t respond at all, staring at the wall, just floating there; afterwards Chris learned that no one had ever really seen him upset before.

  Jiro said, quietly, “You should let the rest of us in on it. It won’t be a prank on you personally, anyway, even if that’s what it is.”

  Peter Denisov looked up and saw everyone—Chris, Lori, Jiro, Tatiana, and François—nodding. Finally, he blurted out, “They claim that they are getting radio messages from Alpha Centauri.”

  * * * *

  5

  WHAT DAD TOLD ME LATER WAS THAT WHAT DENISOV HAD SAID produced an “astonishing silence.” Finally, after a long time, Haldin, floating at the other end of the Big Can, pulled her pale blonde hair back and smoothed her stubby ponytail. Visibly, she composed herself and said, “Peter Mikhailovich, you will embarrass us. If the message is real we need to acknowledge it; if it is a prank we need to report it.”

  Denisov nodded, very unhappily. François said, “If you like, I can call CNRS directly—we are line-of-sight from France—and see what they know about it. A back channel approach, so that if it is a joke no one needs to know that we took it seriously.”

  “What’s CNRS?” Chris said, feeling a little dumb.

  “Centre national pour la recherche scientifiaue,” François explained. “It’s our umbrella science organization; any unclassified problem will go there first. And this is about as unclassified a problem as anyone has ever seen, so I’m sure my friend there will know as much as anyone. Shall I call him?”

  “Do it,” Haldin agreed. She turned to Chris and Lori. “Well, this is going to be a memorable first day at the station for you. How did the flight up go? An American crew riding a French capsule on a Russian rocket must be a complex job.”

  “Well, Starbooster engines have been built in the U.S.A. for three years now, and thank heaven the software and control systems are American,” Lori said, “and that’s all I need to talk to.” She had recognized Haldin’s dig at them, but her orders were to not escalate any arguments; as much as Americans might resent their temporary junior status at ISS and in space, after all it was of their own making, and given that the ugly situation with China seemed to be getting worse, and we needed our traditional Russian, Japanese, and French alliances in the event of trouble, it paid Americans to be nice even when others weren’t.

  Haldin nodded and said, “An uneventful flight is always to be hoped for.”

  By that time François had gotten through to a ground station and was contacting his old friend at CNRS by voice Internet. The small, muscular astro-F gestured for silence, muttering, “It’s a terrible connection, it always is-Allo, Michel!”

  Chris had only a little bit of French, enough to get him around town at conferences; it had only been very recently that American astronauts had had much reason to learn the language, and Russian was still by far the most common second language in the astronaut corps.

  But Lori had spent part of last year training with the astro-Fs in Toulouse, and she had a knack for languages anyway. Chris watched her reactions closely to gauge what was going on. At first she listened patiently; clearly François was making small talk with his friend for a minute, laughing politely and working his way around to the question. Then suddenly François fell silent, and when he spoke again it was fast, loud, and very excited. Then he put the conversation up on the speakers so that everyone could hear both sides. Lori leaned forward eagerly, and slowly, as she listened, her mouth fell open and she breathed in great sighs. By the time the call was over, everyone in the Big Can knew, whether they spoke French or not, from the excitement in the voices.

  “It’s not a prank,” Jiro said, very quietly. “At least for the moment it looks
real.”

  François nodded, gulping for air. “Peter, I think you’re going to have to apologize to whoever called.” He pushed his unruly dark hair back and stretched in the low gravity. “Practically every antenna in the Southern Hemisphere has been getting it.”

  “I think probably everyone will want to talk with their home countries and institutions,” Tatiana said. “And this time was allocated as down time, for the arrival of the Pigeon, so for the next hour and ten minutes, none of us has anything much we are supposed to be doing. If you don’t mind cutting the welcoming party short, we could all get onto communications links and see how much we can learn about this whole situation.”

  “I feel as welcome as I need to,” Lori said. “And Chris will explode if he has to sit here and make small talk while anything like this is happening. Let’s do it.”

  Haldin grinned. “Chris is not the only one who would explode. Well, at the least, let’s take this time and let everyone talk to home. The next thing after that is supposed to be dinner and rest, so let’s make dinner a general meeting where we pool our information.”

  Chris found that it was easy enough to find people who knew the basics, but seemingly impossible to find anyone who knew more than that, by phone. And the basics were scanty: sometime within the last twenty-four hours, on a wavelength of about 0.96 millimeters, a signal had begun to come in strongly from the direction of Alpha Centauri, the triple star, which is the closest star to the Earth. Bits and pieces of the signal seemed to be strangely ordered—it appeared to be a sequence of tones, two different pitches stuttered at an enormous rate—but unfortunately the Earth’s atmosphere is nearly opaque to radio at that wavelength, because the water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs so much of it. Thus it was impossible to catch more than brief snatches of it on even the most sensitive radio telescopes on the ground.

  Theories abounded. The media, naturally, was already claiming that it was messages from aliens; other hypotheses included various strange events in the stellar atmosphere of Alpha Centauri A or Alpha Centauri B, somehow causing one star or the other to act as a giant laser at that wavelength; a huge electrical storm in the atmosphere of a planet circling those stars; the gravity of Alpha Centauri A acting as a lens and focusing radio at that wavelength from a distant source, thus making it seem louder; and many more. The idea that it might be aliens was discounted by many, not just because of the sheer improbability, but also because it didn’t seem likely that an intelligent species would try to contact others using radio on a wavelength that would be mostly blocked by the water-vapor-rich atmosphere of any planet with life.

  All of these theories suffered mainly from the problem that little could really be known directly about Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is the nearest star, but “near” is a relative term; it’s like saying that Key West is the nearest part of the United States to the South Pole. At the speed at which the Apollo astronauts went to the Moon, it would take a little less than 110,000 years—time enough for the last four Ice Ages—for a spaceship to get from Earth to Alpha Centauri. A radio signal, which is 26,500 times faster, takes about four years.

  Physically Alpha Centauri is not one star but three: Alpha Centauri A, a star very slightly larger than our sun; Alpha Centauri B, a smaller star that is only a few astronomical units from A; and Proxima Centauri, a very dim, cool, small star which is so far away from A and B that astronomers debate whether it is really in orbit around them or just moving around the galactic center in an almost identical orbit.

  A and B orbit around their common center of mass—a point in empty space where the average of their masses would be if they were one single body—about every eighty years. In their endless slow waltz, A and B sometimes get as close as eleven AU to each other (ten percent farther than the distance from the Sun to Saturn) and sometimes swing out as far as thirty-five AU (sixteen percent farther than the distance from the Sun to Neptune).

  Chris called a dozen colleagues before it was time for the scheduled dinner on ISS; most of the people he called knew no more than he did. An hour on the phone produced only a list of people to call for the next day.

  Other people had had better luck. When they all gathered for sandwiches and squeeze bags of soup an hour later, there were a few other pieces of information which people had extracted.

  First of all, there were occasional long repetitive strings in the signal, sometimes with only small variations, sometimes with no variations at all. It was believed that it might be repeating on a cycle of hours or days in length, but there was so much noise that it might take months to get a copy of the whole signal—if it stayed on that long and if it was indeed repeating. It was clearly not the product of static discharges in an atmosphere anywhere—unless somehow a gas giant planet in that system had a lasable atmosphere that had spontaneously tuned itself to that frequency. The best guess was that the power level at which it was coming in was actually remarkably uniform.

  Everyone was enjoying throwing in theories when the chime sounded for the phone. Tatiana, as commander, picked it up; a moment later she put it up on speakers.

  “No doubt you’ve heard,” said a voice with a Midwestern drawl that Chris recognized at once as the chairman of the University Space Research Associates, “about the noise from Alpha Centauri. Is Dr. Terence there?”

  “Yes, I am, Bob.”

  “Well, in the last few hours some big changes have happened. When the radio noise from Alpha Centauri began, several observatories in the Southern Hemisphere contacted the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena, and they called the USRA, and NASA, with a suggestion. You have the FSRT, which is the most sensitive radio detector ever constructed. Moreover, you are sitting above the Earth’s atmosphere, which is to say you can get clear reception of the radio signal now emanating from Alpha Centauri. Of course it would be best if the FSRT were already in place on the Moon, since that would allow us to take advantage of the conditions there, but the fact is that conditions at ISS are better for radio observations in the millimeter wavelength than they are anywhere on Earth, ever. And we don’t know how long the signal will last. Thus NASA has authorized us to modify our test for the FSRT; we are asking that you immediately mount a loop antenna, running the length of the truss, and connect that to the FSRT, then attempt to record the signal now coming from Alpha Centauri. A full set of directions and specifications, plus orders from everyone’s national governments, will follow immediately by datalink. You’re going to go out there and get a good copy of that signal for us.”

  “I—thank you,” Chris said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “We’re very fortunate that you happened to be there with the appropriate tool,” the chairman said. “Orders follow, as they say; good luck.” With a sharp click, the call was disconnected.

  “So all we have to do is make a 90-meter loop antenna,” Lori said, “out of whatever we just happen to have brought along.”

  “And rig it overnight,” Chris added. “And have the FSRT work perfectly during its tryout—”

  “Besides,” Denisov added, “you may not recall this, but due to budget cutbacks years ago in your country, there is nowhere on the outward-facing part of the truss to mount any equipment whatsoever—we can’t do any kind of real astronomy here on the station.”

  “I had forgotten that there aren’t any brackets or places to attach things on that side of the station,” Chris admitted.

  Haldin seemed to think for the space of three long breaths, and then she shrugged. “Well, it will do all our careers some good if it works, and hurt nothing if it doesn’t.”

  Denisov nodded. “And we do have a small stock of supplies. We have some large clamps and some insulated wire, probably enough to mount a loop on the outward-facing surface of the truss. Do you have any way of connecting to such a loop?”

  “Some of the test circuit stuff takes standard plugs,” Chris said. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Then let’s get to work on it,” Haldin said. “We need to wo
rk out the technical details now.”

  After a six-hour nap, Chris found himself going out for an EVA with Peter Denisov. Despite the apparent grumpiness of the heavyset Russian, Chris was getting to like him; he’d come to realize that the cosmonaut was intolerant of nonsense and convinced of his own judgment, but more than willing to adopt a good idea once he was convinced of it. (I sometimes have odd memories of him—he used to come and visit my father, and the two of them would go out on the town, usually with women my father had found from wherever it was that he turned them up; I can remember my mother claiming that he must be subscribing to the Bimbo of the Month club. Then the next day Peter would be down in the basement at the workbench with me, helping me put together a model, or we’d be out in the woods riding minibikes, or a thousand other things—for an old grouch, Peter Denisov was pretty good at acting like a teenager.)

  The airlock was tiny, really just a small attachment onto a hatch, and the two men had to go through it separately, each tucking himself and his bulky spacesuit into the small, closet-sized space, half-squatting, waiting for the air to be pumped out of the lock and back into the Big Can, then opening the outer door and climbing out with a bag of supplies and closing the outer door behind himself. Denisov, as the more experienced of the two, went first, and when Chris emerged and closed the hatch, he was already set up and ready to go. “Before we start,” Denisov said, his voice crackling through the radio in Chris’s helmet, “is this your first EVA?”