Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  The arrows clearly specified that the viewer was supposed to produce light of that wavelength, pulsed according to another set of directions where the unit of time seemed to be based on how long it took 4096 wavelengths of that light to go by a fixed point in a vacuum. That light should be directed onto the square plug in the box; light at 128 different frequencies, specified by more pictures of atoms, would emerge from the round plug, stuttered so as to form streams of base-eight numbers. (In effect, it was like having a television getting 128 channels at once; we would just have to pick which channel we wanted to “watch” and which to “tape” first.) The first tiny fraction of that would be a copy of this message (or so everyone interpreted it to say), apparently for calibration; then there would be sixteen days of data coming through apparently at ten gigabaud rates on all the channels.

  This was confirmed by what appeared to be a sign showing that there would be ten million times as much information in the message that came out of the box as there would be in the message we had received by radio. Now that we had deciphered enough of the message to know the intended play speed, we knew the message was supposed to be seven minutes and forty seconds long; ergo, the information contained in that box was the equivalent of a movie one hundred forty-six thousand twelve years long— or of perhaps half a million average-length books, the equivalent of a small college library.

  So what the box appeared to be was the record—poems, paintings, music, literature, science, engineering, jokes, whatever—of a civilization about 200 years in advance of our own, assuming that their technological progress had taken a roughly equivalent path. Within days of the message being decoded, nearly everyone, all at once, had taken to calling it the Encyclopedia; no one knew where that term had come from.

  Probably the message hadn’t been addressed to us, but intended to tell Tiberian colonies at the lunar south pole and at Crater Korolev on Mars where to find the box with all the information. Why they hadn’t sent one to Phobos, even though their little map seemed to say they had gone there, was another puzzle—I remember Dad, Peter Denisov, and Aunt Lori arguing about that one out on the back porch when I was trying to sleep. Had the Tiberians lost or abandoned their Phobos colony? Had it been just a temporary stop on the way to Mars? To annoy the other two, Peter sometimes maintained that the colony on Phobos had been bad, and that was why they didn’t get any Encyclopedia.

  The name “Encyclopedia” for the box that contained so much Tiberian information had stuck early and thoroughly. So had the most fundamental idea of all on the subject—that the human race ought to go and get the Encyclopedia, returning to the moon after more than thirty years since Apollo 17.

  The question was, which part of the human race, and how? At first, since the Chinese had the only actual plan to get to the Moon, they had simply declared that they would accelerate their efforts, go get the Encyclopedia, and “share” with other nations “according to their needs.” This had led to an emergency Four Power Space Conference, comprised of the U.S., Russia, Japan, and France (hastily rejoined by ESA, because the other nations of Europe had abruptly realized they might be left out entirely). With a combination of proven Russian and European technology, plus American and Japanese manufacturing capability and materials, it should be possible to “beat the Chinese from a standing start,” as the president of the United States put it.

  This was growing more urgent, because the Cold Peace was threatening to get hot at any moment. American vessels were shadowed by Chinese submarines everywhere from Pusan to Haiphong, Russian forces were moving up to the line for “border incidents” every few weeks, and the Chinese were issuing not-very-veiled threats to begin shooting down communications satellites if direct satellite broadcasts into China did not cease. Since many of those satellites were now privately operated by companies in flag-of-convenience countries, and most of the offensive broadcasts were originating with private Chinese émigré groups, even if they had wanted to, the four powers could not have shut them down. Meanwhile the Chinese burned more coal per capita every year, and as dark clouds of soot rolled across Japan, Korea, Formosa, and the Philippines, the Pacific Rim nations, using Japanese money and Korean military expertise, began to rapidly rearm. Confronted with the real possibility of nuclear missile attack for the first time in a generation, Russia and the United States began to seriously plan for and build missile defenses for the first time in either of their histories; China’s ICBMs were still few in number, and there was still the possibility that being able to shoot some of them down might make a difference.

  In the context of such a competition, the possibility of the Chinese getting the Encyclopedia, and with it a two-hundred-year leap in technology, was completely unacceptable. The Speaker of the House put it succinctly: “We can’t let them have the only library card in the solar system.”

  Yet a race for the Encyclopedia was extremely risky for both sides. First there was the possibility of losing; then there was the prospect that one side or other, in its haste, might take too many risks and destroy the Encyclopedia; finally and worst was the prospect of knowledge from the Encyclopedia being deployed hastily and without forethought—”What if you’d given Napoleon the atom bomb? What if the Civil War had been fought with airplanes dropping poison gas on cities?” It seemed to many of the decision-makers involved that not only did the Encyclopedia need to be secured for everyone, it also needed to be used thoughtfully, with some idea about what we were and weren’t ready to tackle at this point in our history.

  It was the Third World nations that truly brought China to the conference table, however. Just as in the previous Cold War, the militarily and economically weaker power had to look for cheap ways to harass the enemy, and financing revolutionary movements around the world, particularly in resource-rich areas, had been the obvious way. But the Third World leadership had learned from the squabbles over the Law of the Sea Treaty and the Moon Treaty that if they left the big nations that could get the resources to their own devices, the likely rule for the exploitation of distant resources was “finders keepers”—a process in which the rich nations could get richer while the poor nations lost markets for raw materials. As poor nations, they could hardly approve of that.

  The Four Power Plan was not perfect from the Third World standpoint, but it did require that the contents of the Encyclopedia be downloaded into a readily accessible form and made available to everyone. The Chinese plan— that China would decide what everyone else needed to know—was much more threatening. And because Chinese operations in the Third World required great numbers of sympathetic governments there, when a dozen usually pro-Chinese leaders began to complain about the Chinese position, China was forced to sit up and take notice.

  Thus, reluctantly, and jealous of its rights, a Chinese delegation joined the Four Power planning session, and within a year a plan had been worked out for a mission to the lunar south pole to retrieve the Encyclopedia. The most important thing to everyone involved seemed to be to get access to the Encyclopedia. To set up a task force to go to the Moon and download it onto other media there, without moving it, was obviously time-consuming and judged to be impractical. Thus the Encyclopedia would have to be found and flown back to Earth.

  The plan, therefore, was built around the simple question, “How can we get the Encyclopedia from wherever it is around the lunar pole back to the Earth’s surface, where our experts can study it?” First robot explorers would go, to search the area and find the place where the Encyclopedia lay. When the robots found the Encyclopedia, they would plant a radio transponder to mark out a landing site within a short distance. Then an unmanned lunar lander—equipped to haul a heavy cargo, because the description of the Encyclopedia had not specified a mass and for all anyone knew it might be made out of lead, gold, or depleted uranium—would land near it. A team of four would fly in in a second lander, with spare fuel, and set down nearby; the team would then load the Encyclopedia into the first lander and refuel it to capacity. Two of the
team would then fly the full lander directly back to Earth for a splashdown landing like the first Moon missions; the other two would return in their lander, or continue their stayover, depending on what seemed to be the most effective use of them.

  The plan lasted only until the first robots got to the south pole and found not an Encyclopedia but a complete Tiberian base, including one of their spacecraft parked in a deep crater, a vast bank of solar collectors high up on the inside of a crater wall, clear evidence of habitations for many Tiberians, and something that looked too much like a graveyard—neat rows of stone cairns, roughly of human body length—to be anything else. Within days almost everyone in the world had seen the pictures, and two equal and opposite effects had happened.

  On the one hand, “Tiber Base,” as it had been dubbed, was seen as a fascinating place that everyone wanted to know more about. On the other hand, it enormously complicated the search for the Encyclopedia, for there were two possibilities: either the Tiberians had moved the Encyclopedia into some part of Tiber Base, in which case human explorers would have to go there and open the doors and peer into the storage spaces, or else the Encyclopedia had arrived after Tiber Base was dead or abandoned and might have come down at a considerable distance. The public, never particularly logical in their approach to the world, concluded that since Tiber Base was the best evidence so far that the Tiberian message had told the truth, then people would need to go to Tiber Base, and in at least the democratic nations of Russia, the United States, Japan, and France, that swung a great deal of weight.

  Thus the plan was hastily rewritten and rescheduled. An unmanned lander, equipped to bring a crew back, would go to Tiber Base first. Then a first manned mission would land at Tiber Base to look for the Encyclopedia; meanwhile, the robots would continue to look for it everywhere else around the base. The first mission would also do some simple construction to create a better base for the second expedition, which would arrive after them as the first “stay over” mission (i.e., only two of them would return; two others would remain to work with the third mission when it arrived). The second expedition, among other things, would set up a power plant to process the ice in the deep craters at the south pole (where sunlight has never reached since the craters were formed).

  The Moon, where water never flowed and there is no air for any practical purpose, might seem to be a strange place to find ice, but the lunar south pole was a special case. Most of the Moon undergoes a two-week-long day followed by a two-week-long night, for as the Moon swings around the Earth, always facing the Earth, it rotates with respect to the Sun. (Imagine that you are the Sun, a tree at a distance is the Earth, and a friend of yours is the Moon. If he walks around the tree, keeping his face to the tree the whole time, then when he is nearest you, his back is toward you; when he is farthest away, his face is toward you. In the same way, every point on the Moon’s equator must eventually face the Sun.)

  During the two weeks of dark, lunar rocks become so cold that any water molecule that hits them will stick to them; if there is any water around it will freeze to those rocks, forming frost. During the two weeks of light, the same rocks grow hot enough to throw the water molecules off, with speeds high enough so that the water molecules don’t quite go into orbit, but do bound for hundreds of kilometers. If it happens that they come down and hit a lighted, hot rock, they will gain still more energy, and bounce higher the next time; after anywhere from four to ten bounces off rocks in daylight, the water molecules will bounce right off the Moon and be lost forever.

  But if they hit a dark rock, they will stick. Usually they only stick until the sun comes up on that part of the Moon, and then begin the process of bouncing again, until they either hit and stick on the dark side, or bounce off the Moon from the light side. As years go by and lunar day follows lunar night, less and less water is left at the end of each lunar day, and the Moon becomes bone dry.

  But that is only what usually happens. The deep craters at the south pole never receive sunlight; the rocks in them are always dark. Thus when a water molecule bounces into one of those craters, it hits, sticks, and stays—forever.

  And though such events are rare, water does come to the Moon— often in the form of a comet. Comets, in Fred Hoyle’s immortal phrase, are “dirty snowballs”—a scattering of big rocks in a mountain-sized ball of water ice. As millennia pass, now and again a comet strikes the Moon, bursting apart as it digs a new crater and sets millions or billions of tons of water loose on the surface. Most of it disappears quickly in the eternal game of freeze and bounce—but some happens into the craters at the south pole, and it remains there to this day. As the millions of years slide by, eventually it gets to be an immense amount of water.

  There were many tons of ice there; ice is made of hydrogen and oxygen—and oxygen is heavy stuff, eighty-nine percent of the weight of water. Not only would it provide water for various uses on Tiber Base, but it would also provide a source of oxygen that didn’t involve hauling it a quarter of a million miles into the sky, and later might well provide liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel for the Pigeons as well. Oxygen gotten in that fashion was dubbed “lunox” to differentiate it from the stuff hauled up from Earth.

  With enough stayovers, there would be a substantial base there, using pressurized rovers—big slow-moving land vehicles that looked a bit like milk trucks with room enough for crews to sleep and eat in them—to carry on a search.

  Whenever the Encyclopedia was found, the next lander coming out would be sent unmanned to the Encyclopedia site, a crew would go out from the base at Tiber Base (unless, of course, the Encyclopedia was already there), and that crew would bring the Encyclopedia home.

  The primary crew cabin for the missions would be the Aerospatiale/ Rockwell Pigeon. (By now everyone was calling it that, and “Apollo II” survived only in official company literature.) Habitats and other construction would be built around Big Cans and Starbird drop tanks, since both were already proven-successful pressure vessels. The Japanese undertook to develop the rover; as was rapidly becoming traditional, it was the big Russian boosters, primarily the Energiya, that would supply the thrust to get to the Moon.

  The Chinese contribution, more than anything else, was to not try for the Encyclopedia on their own. In exchange for that they got one half of the crew slots; the Four Powers knew which way things went and put up with it, despite the grumbling of the space crews themselves.

  “There’s another part of the deal,” Dad said to me, as we sat outside having ice cream that warm summer night in late 2008. “Not yet made public. Your, uh, mother’s husband—” that was usually how he designated Sig to me”—well, he’s got an idea. An old idea, really, but he’s going to try to make it work. And if he does, then we might be on better terms with the Chinese. It was part of what got them to take the deal.”

  “So what’s the idea?” I asked.

  “Well, hmm. It’s like this. A lot of China’s problems would be solved if they got a decent cheap source of energy, because then they could stop burning coal and making the air over Japan dirty, and they could also raise the standard of living for their people by quite a lot. So one idea that’s been around since the 1960s is that if you put a solar power plant in space—where the sun shines all the time and there’s never any clouds— you can beam the power down to Earth using microwaves in a tight beam. You catch the microwaves on an antenna, which converts them back to electricity, and presto, you have cheap power. Much more efficient than ground-based solar.”

  “What happens if the beam gets pointed in the wrong direction?” I asked.

  “If the antenna detects the beam moving at all, it sends a signal up to the satellite to shut off until the problem is fixed. Anyway, uh, Sig has a contract with the Chinese to build them a power station like that, since his Starbirds are going to make space travel cheaper and he’s been able to hire different contractors with a lot of experience building in space. Basically he’s doing it for a lot less than cost, and we and
the Japanese are picking up the tab and labeling it research—but what it is, is a disguised bribe to the Chinese to get them aboard on this. And since the bribe is flowing through Sig’s hands, I guess he’ll make a pretty good chunk of money on it.

  “Another thing it does is delay the issue of helium-3 mining on the Moon; the Encyclopedia is a bad enough tangle without putting that in.”

  “Helium-3 is the stuff they run the new fusion reactors on?” I asked. I knew, but I hadn’t been seeing much of Dad lately, and I wanted him to keep talking.

  He looked up at the darkening cloudless sky, set down his empty ice cream bowl, and said, “Yeah. Once they figured out that you needed the colliding-beam technology to make it work—the only way to get a high enough effective temperature in the stuff you were fusing was to run atoms of it head-on into each other—they were able to figure out what the maximum collision velocities they could get were, and from that they knew that only the light isotope of helium was workable in it. If you remember, Sig’s research division was the one that figured out there’s enough of it in deep ocean vents so that going to the Moon to extract it from the soil wasn’t viable. But now that we’re going to have regular traffic, at least for a while, between Earth and Moon—” He sighed. “We just get a frontier opened up again, and already people are figuring out how to make it cluttered and corrupt and a mess. We’ve never learned a thing, you know?”