The Asteroid

by M R Cates

  “That's what most people say, Carl, actually. And probably you and they are right. What I mean is a little different, though. In the human body, for example, our motive power comes from the muscles. But the nerve pulses – low power themselves – make the muscles work. Without the nerves, the power supplies – the muscles – atrophy. Those streams seem to always be flowing, even if dimly. Maybe they act like nerves.”

  “Are you sure they always flow, Sandra?”

  “Actually, no. That's another wild-ass notion. They sometimes, oftentimes, drop below our detection thresholds. Maybe they do cut off, but ... well ... what do you think, Carl?”

  “How far out into the infrared can you go?”

  “As you may remember, Carl, the atmosphere starts cutting off around two microns, with a few gaps that let some wavelengths through, out to a pretty wide gap at about ten microns. A little longer than that is completely stopped, until you get out to centimeter wavelengths – our microwave friends. Françoise is actually studying that ten-micron region.”

  “What about the space telescope?”

  “It has scanned through a number of wavelengths, including the vacuum UV and into the infrared. And it has seen the streams occasionally, but .. well, it has a glitch at the moment, Carl.”

  “A glitch?”

  “Yes. The far infrared region of the spectrometer is effectively dead. Dead beyond around 2.4 microns, in fact.”

  “Strange, Sandra. What is wrong? And when did it occur?”

  “The IR grating is non-functional. Has been since – actually just before the fragments appeared. Can't be scanned.”

  “Did the aliens do something to the grating, Sandra?”

  “What aliens, Carl? We still don't know if they're there.” She was teasing him slightly. “Doubt they did it, though,” she continued. “JPL thinks it's an electronic failure of a type they've had a number of times. Keeps the grating from being scanned. It's stuck at 2.4 microns, in fact. We've taken data with it there, but ... “

  “Does that signal go away, too, from time to time, Sandra?”

  “Seems so.”

  “Then there's no easy way to test your 'nerve' hypothesis,” he said.

  “That's why I want to stick something in the way.”

  “What about the military satellite?”

  Sandra's eyebrows rose. “Could be done,” she said. “But it might not be appreciated by our friends the green men.”

  “If your idea is correct it certainly would not be,” Carl said.

  “It's something we continue to talk about. But for the moment everything is so much like it has been that most people are unwilling to consider anything more daring than to push that satellite about twenty miles closer.”

  “When will that take place?”

  “Soon. If we agree. There will be a telecom tomorrow afternoon. Possibly we'll decide then. For things like this the DOD gets in on the act, so no telling how much bullshit bureaucracy will have to be dealt with.”

  Carl took his last sip of wine. “Perhaps, Sandra, he said, noticeably tired at that point, but with an earnest tone, “you could consider reconstructing some of the data you've sampled and send it back to them.”

  Sandra stared at her old friend a moment. “Hmm,” she said, forming a smile for an instant. “Perhaps we can,” she mimicked, speaking in her approximation of his accent. “Ach, ja.”

  Chapter 20

  Françoise Marnier was in dark blue shorts and short sleeved pale-blue cotton blouse, sandals, no socks, and had her hair done up in French braids. Her tan was noticeably darker to Sandra, and the student was very excited to see her mentor and (now) major professor. Jason Nagato, in jeans and gray tee shirt, also in sandals, had been working with Françoise non-stop for days, and seemed – in Sandra's eye – to be very taken by the French student. Françoise seemed less taken by him, but the two were an excellent team. Jason was a very quick study related to operational details and Françoise had a good mind, excellent background, and a fine grasp of the mathematical skills necessary for a modern astronomer. The two reported their activities in some detail to Sandra in her office just before the general meeting, which would include telecom links to a dozen observatories around the world. After their report, she sent them home, knowing they'd already been there for twelve hours or more. Just before going into the small conference room next to the Keck control room she sat down with a notebook in which she jotted down a number of brief notes. Earlier in the evening, after returning from dinner with Carl, she'd talked to Reginald Wyler and several others around the world, using her encrypted cell phone. Not as well prepared as she'd wished to be, Dr. Sandra Hughes nonetheless began the teleconference on time.

  All the audio and video being sent around the globe for these meetings was being encrypted, and had been for a number of weeks. Sandra didn't let herself imagine that the aliens might be able to break the encryption; however, the meetings were generally scientific sessions, not given to much speculation, and certainly did not have the overtones that meetings would have if they were concerned with national defense or evaluation of threats and the like. After a series of reports on various studies being done, complete with video images, graphs and charts, an hour had gone by. In the room with Sandra were four astronomers from the Keck Observatory and five other scientists visiting from other American and foreign facilities. It was not unusual to have a dozen more than this in this regular bi-weekly session, but events with the asteroid and fragments were indeed at a low ebb, keeping attendance down. She ended the reports by giving a short version of her and Wyler's meetings with the Presidential, Congressional, and U.N. staffers. All the while she'd left the most recently recorded image sequence of Fragment Five on the display screen behind her. It was a brilliantly resolved view from the twin Kecks, a deeply shadowed brownish stone doughnut with a sometimes discernible orange glow emanating from what appeared to be thin, jagged fissures running roughly parallel to the circular symmetry of the object. The fissures appeared as very narrow lines along the surface, difficult to distinguish against the fairly dark stone. There were some other mottles on the surface, and a few discolorations – all of which were constantly under study – but none had so far yielded any real clue as to their purpose, if any.

  When Sandra asked for any questions or discussion at the end of the reports, only three clarification questions were posed. Those answered by various participants, she adjourned the meeting, said goodbye to all the telecom links and indicated for the audio-video technicians to close down the local links. There were a few minutes of casual conversation with the people in the room, then they began drifting out, one by one. It was late enough at night that most were anxious to get home or to their hotels. By shortly after midnight, Sandra was alone with her notes, gathered them and left, pulling the conference room door closed behind her. Passing the control room, she waved at the several on duty, and walked in the direction of her office. On the way, she got a cup of coffee – a little stale, but drinkable – and enjoyed the feeling of being in a familiar hallway. Sandra's body clock was still a little off from her time in Washington, and she felt both tired and wide awake, at the same time. Going to her desk, she took the coffee, sat, drank, and began to turn on her monitors, and the electronic connections into the control room, displaying several scenes of Fragment Five. The object was passing across the Hawaii sky, about a third of the way through its passage. For ten minutes or more she simply stared at the images and sipped coffee, cradling the cup in her hands and letting her mind rove more or less aimlessly. She barely noticed the orange flash at first, but it diverted her gaze. When the flash repeated she saw it clearly.

  Sandra spoke into her link to control room. “Are you observing Fragment Five?” she asked.

  “Yes, we see the color flashes,” came the answer.

  “Okay. Recording all in order?”

  “Affirmative, Dr. Hughes.” That particular technician had a military background.

  Sandra leaned forwa
rd. This was a new thing. The colors she'd seen before had tended to swell up and down in intensity and wavelength, brightening, dimming, or shifting over periods of seconds, sometimes minutes. These were little flashes. They came from random places along the interior of the opening – the region of Sandra's main interest – and were bright orange, almost yellow. The sequences seemed as random as the locations along the inner diameter from whence each flash came. Sandra waited and watched. What is this? she thought. Something intentional on the aliens' part was going on.

  Looking at a list of numbers, Sandra called the JPL control center for the space telescope. The astronomer on duty had been in on the recent teleconference.

  “Sid,” she said, to Dr. Sidney McCormack, “what are you seeing on Fragment Five?”

  McCormack put down the phone and asked some questions she could not hear. He was also adjusting some nearby equipment. “Nothing unusual,” he said after a minute. “Just like it looked yesterday and the day before.”

  “Really? No flashes?”

  “Flashes? No. Are you seeing flashes?”

  “Indeed we are.”

  “We'll keep looking. Our orientation changes a lot. Will let you know, Sandra.”

  “Thanks, Sid.”

  Sandra knew the instruments on Palomar Mountain would also be looking at the fragment, so she called there, too. Again, no flashes. Excitement built up, despite her fatigue. Obviously, the flashes were directional, like laser flashes. And aimed at Hawaii or nearby. Was this accidental?

  A thought crossed her mind. The next island north of Hawaii, Maui, had several observatories on Haleakala, a 10,000 foot volcano similar to Mauna Kea. This mountain top was just over 50 miles away from the Kecks. One of these Haleakala observatories was a military station – U.S. Navy – with a twenty-inch telescope. This scope would be (or could be) aimed at Fragment Five. Sandra called, reaching a Lieutenant JG Melissa Gregory, who was on duty at the telescope.

  “Are you looking at Fragment Five, Lieutenant?” Sandra asked, after introducing herself.

  The young officer was slightly flustered because of the caller, but said, “No, ma'am. We aren't, at the moment.”

  “Do you have its coordinates?”

  After a hesitation. “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Would you do me the favor of taking a look?”

  The question put Lieutenant Gregory off a little, but she said, “I guess ... well, I suppose so. It must be important, Dr. Hughes.”

  “It is. Thank you very much. May I stay on the line?”

  The officer agreed and began the process of re-aiming the 20-incher. It took less than a minute. “I have it, ma'am,” she said.

  “Do you see flashes around the inner diameter, random and intermittent?”

  “Flashes? No, ma'am. Maybe our resolution isn't good ...”

  “I'm sure it's quite adequate, Lieutenant. Your image is quite sharp, I suspect.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “And no flashes?”

  “No, ma'am.”

  “Thank you so much,” Sandra said. “We'd appreciate it if you'd continue to watch the fragment and record.”

  “Yes, ma'am, Dr. Hughes. We'll do that.”

  “Do I need to speak to a commanding officer, Lieutenant, about changing your programming for the 20-incher?”

  “No, ma'am, I'll ... I'll make notes here on our log. No reason to wake anyone up.”

  “Thank you again,” Sandra said, then disconnected.

  Her eyes had not left the display on her desk. The flashes continued, at a rate of about fifteen or twenty per minute, sometimes clustered in time or in location. Sandra scratched her head. It seemed that the fragment was sending the flashes directly to Mauna Kea, nowhere else. As it moved across the sky it would be necessary to slightly change the direction of each flash to exactly target the Keck site. They know we're here, she thought. They must know we're looking at them. But she knew that hundreds, maybe thousands of telescopes were also looking at Fragment Five. As she watched, the flashes continued for another ten minutes, then the inner ring from whence they came suddenly flashed uniformly, a full circle, then stopped. Sandra scratched her head again and continued to watch.

  Five minutes later, the control room called. “Flashes have stopped, Dr. Hughes,” came the report.

  “Thanks,” Sandra said. “Just keep watching and recording, okay? If anything new happens, let me know. Otherwise, I want to do a little analysis. I'll get back with you.”

  Standing, Sandra walked around in the office for a moment, all the while watching the image of Fragment Five, now as placidly unchanging as it had been before. She did notice occasional glows at the fissures, but those were similar to the long-term behavior that was well documented. Sandra sat. She accessed the recording system and read back into her local computer the image data beginning with the first flashes and ending with the flash of the circle. What is this all about?” Whatever the purpose or meaning of the flashes, it was clear they were aimed at Mauna Kea. In effect, they were aimed at her. Sandra was not arrogant enough to believe that literally, namely that she herself was the target. But she did identify herself with the task at hand, associated with data coming in from Mauna Kea. At that moment, the decisions related to the Kecks and the data they were receiving were hers.

  Let me think about this, Sandra said to herself. What is this all about? She displayed the first few flashes, frame by frame, advancing the 1/30 second from one frame to the next by a keystroke. Each flash was captured in a single frame. The ensuing frames showed it fading. This was not uncommon behavior for a video signal. The flash would cause a local saturation and several scans, or frames, could be necessary to wipe away, or discharge, the bright spot. These are quite short pulses, probably, Sandra thought. She turned her attention to the spectrometer data, collecting the information at different wavelengths. Their most sensitive instrument of this type was gathering light from the entire fragment, with no image information, and separating it into colors. Another, less sensitive instrument collected the data as images, like single color photographs. Jason Nagato, at Sandra's instruction, had set up this imaging spectrograph to produce three images, the first with light from 600 to 620 nanometers wavelength (yellow), the second with 620 to 640 nanometers (orange), and the third with 640 to 700 nanometers (red). When she looked at the three sets of images, she noticed the flashes were shown only in the second, the orange, image. Looking at the sensitive (non-imaging) spectrograph data, she saw, at the moment of each flash, a peak appear at 632 nanometers, rising and falling rapidly. Looks like a few nanosecond wide flashes, she mused. Very much like a laser.

  Sandra sat back to ponder a moment. The flashes were short, very directional, and all seemed to be at 632 nanometers wavelength. This was quite a departure from the light emission characteristics shown by either the asteroid or the fragments up until that moment. And they came from seemingly random places along the inside diameter of the fragment. Obviously that meant something. In fact, Sandra decided, the distribution of the source locations and the time between flashes must have some meaning, carry some information. But what?

  She set up a coordinate system to help understand the data. The inside circle of the fragment, with flashes emitted from somewhere along the ring of the circle, was divided up into degrees. All the way around the circle, in the usual convention, was 360 degrees. She picked the zero degree point on the circle as the point on the right side of her view that corresponded to the angle between earth and the sun, the line of the ecliptic. Then, going counterclockwise around the circle would be the progression of degrees. Ninety degrees would be north, perpendicular to the ecliptic plane (and about 50 degrees more than the 40-degree angle of the fragment's orbit made with the ecliptic plane), 180 degrees would be west, back to the ecliptic plane, and 270 degrees, south, below the ecliptic plane. With that coordinate system, then, she could locate each flash, assign it an angle and a time. Fingers flying, Sandra accomplished the task quickly, ending by display
ing a plot of angle versus time on one of her screens. The display showed a horizontal line (time) with different lengths of vertical lines coming up from it (angles) all along its length. Sandra shook her head. It all looked quite random. The spaces between vertical lines were certainly not close to even, and the vertical lines jumped up to different heights arbitrarily. Or so it seemed. But she knew there was information there. Obviously. The aliens would not have aimed their flashes at Mauna Kea simply for fun. Or would they?

  Considering the coordinate system she'd used, Sandra knew that the zero point she'd selected was arbitrary, based on her traditional thinking as an astronomer. The heights of lines representing angles near the end of her chosen system would be tall; those near the beginning short. The heights representing angles close to the zero value, that is, say, two degrees and 358 degrees were very different, one short, the other tall, yet the difference between them was only four degrees, only a little over one percent of the total way around the circle. Have to do something less arbitrary, Sandra thought. She changed her display so that the vertical lines were replaced by points representing the upper end of each line. Now she had a series of dots located at various vertical distances above a reference line. Then she had the computer connect the dots with straight lines, making her display look like jagged points. It reminded her, in fact, of the profile of a field of grass, with blades of different widths, ending in little points of different heights. Sandra shook her head, then scratched it. She didn't like the connecting lines, and turned them off, leaving the pattern of dots. She looked at the vertical positions of the dots, noticing about as many at any one height as another. Perhaps some fewer near the maximum height. Some of the dots seemed to have a kind of meaningful association but she couldn't be sure what it was. That wasn't surprising, after all, because her own selected reference system, her choice of zero, was ... then she knew the next step.

  Sandra quickly wrote a program in Visual Basic – a tool she used like a fluent second language – running her zero angle reference all the way around the circle, in one degree steps, pausing and displaying the dots briefly after each adjustment. She began moving the zero counterclockwise, so the old one-degree position became zero and the old zero became the new 359 degrees. The second step would put zero where the original two degrees had been, and so on. The program began stepping and Sandra watched the pattern of dots. She saw almost immediately that the dots began to make more sense. Aren't they cute, those little green men? she smiled as she thought. Dots that had been high – near 360 degrees – suddenly got low as they went through the new zeros, and vice versa, low dots became high. At a particular point – startlingly – the distributed points suddenly formed what looked like letters. Hitting the stop key, Sandra leaned back and looked at the screen, stunned. She was looking at a message. A message in her own language, formed by the dots. “Well, I'll be damned!” she mumbled aloud.