The Asteroid

by M R Cates

  Sandra Hughes stood up, scratching her head, mind racing. She walked around the chair over to the window and looked out into the night. There were few lights of Waimea on to interfere with her view of the sky. The moon had set. Bright patches of stars were visible through a few scattered and thin clouds. Fragment Five would soon leave their view, later to return on its next orbit. She looked up to where she estimated it would be, not far above the horizon. The astronomer's heart was beating as fast as she could ever remember. Hand on her head, scratching thoughtfully, she went back to her seat and looked at the screen. The message was still there.

  It read: “Doctor Sandra Hughes, please answer.”

  The letters were formed by closely spaced dots. The type was recognizable, a kind of Helvetica, she thought, and with a slight tilt of each letter allowing dots distributed in time to form the slanted vertical parts of each letter's shape as well has the horizontal details. Very clever indeed. Until she'd gotten close to the proper choice of zero on the circle, low dots would be high and vice versa, confusing the pattern enough to be indiscernible. So they know our language, our alphabet, and even, possibly, the difference between fonts. Amazing.

  Sandra arose once again and left her office, heading for the coffee pot. She was conflicted within: a sense of needing to do something immediately, combined with an equally strong realization that she had time, that there really was no need for immediate action. Fragment Five was out of range at the moment and wouldn't be back for well over an hour. As Sandra started the process of brewing a pot of coffee, using frozen beans and grinding them in an electric grinder, a security guard passed her in the hall, smiling. She waved and acknowledged him in a friendly way, watching the man turn the corner. His route would take him by the control room. Had anyone there looked at the data? Probably not. But she would ask – in a while.

  Steaming coffee in her hands, cradled in the usual way, the brew's aroma sent reality coursing through her. It was rare that she made a pot of coffee from beans, normally using one of the supply of prepared ground packets, in the interest of time and known outcome for the brewing. The beans, however, were very special Kona select, ones Carl Von Drath had given her last Christmas. Somehow she'd gotten the quantity right – not usual in her clumsy coffee preparation – and the taste and smell were perfect. She drank two warming, comforting sips, then re-entered her office and sat down in front of the message. Why was my name used? Does it make sense they would want to speak to me? Sandra scratched her head. This was a kind of intelligence that had undoubtedly achieved – if in no other way than the actions of the asteroid – technological success beyond human dreams. There would be some reason for using her name. And she was expected to answer. How? After staring at the screen a while longer, Sandra wrote another Visual Basic program, finishing in about fifteen minutes. Then she called the control room.

  “Jeremy,” Sandra said to the technician on duty, named Jeremy Schaefer, “would you send me the controls to the ACLs?” (She referred to the atmospheric correction lasers, used to sample air scattering.)

  “Okay, Dr. Hughes. What do you make of the flashes?”

  “Talking to us,” Sandra said, sounding casual.

  Schaefer said, “Must be, I guess. Pretty strange language though.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy,” Sandra said, noticing he'd thrown the appropriate switch.

  It took only a few minutes more to link her computer to the ACL, allowing the new code to modulate the lasers' power supplies. Sandra had decided to give the aliens a little test of her own. She wrote her reply in Morse Code, using a short, ten nanosecond flash for dit, and a longer, hundred nanosecond flash for dah. Between the dah-dit pattern for each letter she put a one microsecond gap. The re-acquisition of Fragment Five was still fifteen minutes away when Sandra was ready. Leaning back she finished her coffee, then went to get another cup.

  Twenty minutes passed, then again she called the control room. “I'm going to override the ACLs for a few seconds, guys,” she said. “But you'll have them back quickly enough to keep everything sharp as usual.”

  “Alright, Dr. Hughes,” came the answer. For Sandra Hughes to override something for a while was more normal than leaving things alone, so there seemed no special interest from the control room.

  Fragment Five was back in all its glory. The lock was good. Sandra looked at it with renewed fascination. There were the occasionally glowing fissures, as before. It was, in fact, just as she'd last seen it. The ACLs she was about to activate, with their narrow beams, would strike the fragment’s surface with all their optical power. Further, she was beefing up the intensity to maximum, about ten times the normal brightness used. Then passed five minutes of checking and rechecking her plan. Sandra pondered whether to call Carl and wake him up. She decided against it. Guess I'm as ready as I'll ever be, she thought, and hit return on her keyboard.

  Shooting skyward was Sandra's reply: “Hello, I got your message. Nice to hear from you.” She watched the live telescope image as her sequence kicked in. It required much less than a second to send it. Then the ACLs went back to normal mode. Wondering what indication she'd have, if any, that her message was seen, Sandra scratched her head. But only for five seconds. The inner ring of Fragment Five, exactly mimicking the final full circular flash from earlier, flashed uniformly, not once, but three times.

  “They got it!” Sandra shouted aloud. “By damn, they got it!”

  Chapter 21

  Sandra Hughes noticed her hands were trembling. The enormity of the situation in which she found herself was beyond her full grasp, beyond any reasonable expectation of coherent comprehension. Had she done the right thing in answering the query from Fragment Five? Over the previous months a growing bureaucracy, international in scope, had sprung up around the asteroid. More and more government officials, military leaders, even industrial magnates with various degrees of influence had begun to wield more and more power over the scientific teams that studied the skies. Reginald Wyler had done his best to protect his own scientists, especially Sandra, from the crush of outside influence, but he was limited in authority. Sandra understood that other forces, outside the scientific community, had to take control. She understood it, but didn't have to like it. The asteroid and what it represented – at least potentially – were, after all, the business of everyone on earth. Government leaders, the experts on power and authority, knew instinctively that such a potential threat was their area of expertise, their area of involvement, their responsibility. The asteroid's arrival, in fact, had given rise to excuses for leaders, even of the world's most advantaged and civilized countries, to presume upon a level of authority and control that would not be granted by their constituencies under normal conditions. Lesser government leaders, in particular, the thugs and criminals in charge of poor, historically oppressed societies that were sometimes called The Third World, also saw that the asteroid and the world's preoccupation with it offered further opportunities in their thirst for power. Many of these poor countries were now more oppressed than before. There was little interest expressed in The West or other affluent areas of earth in cracking down on totalitarian leaders, because those devastated societies were now seen in the light of the world as a single watery globe, and a globe that might face a serious threat. The world was even seen – though the idea was rarely articulated in public – as a globe whose poor areas were more of a liability than asset. If there were to be any sort of challenge from the asteroid, diversions associated with The Third World and its petty problems and needs were not to be tolerated. More and more focus in Washington, Tokyo, Brussels and Beijing was being turned to organization of resources, improved internal communications, emergency planning, and the like. The public in the advanced countries, however, were to be handled with kid gloves. It was this awareness, this political savvy, that guided Jeff McBrand's policies, and those of his counterparts around the world.

  It was not entirely accidental that Dr. Sandra Hughes, with her young, almost innocent man
ner, and her first-hand knowledge of the astronomical facts associated with the asteroid, had been left in the role of spokesperson for the scientific community. She was no threat to the political power structure and offered the kind of cover that might be needed by political leaders from time to time. With Sandra in the public eye the events associated with the asteroid could be maintained in the context of science, almost of science fiction. Her demeanor and appearance comprised nothing threatening, even when her words were sober, or even suggestive of potential for impending difficulties. Yes, part of the decision to elevate Sandra in the public view occurred naturally, as a result of how the asteroid was discovered and the early events associated with it. But – especially after his first conversation with her – President McBrand had quickly recognized the value of keeping her as a kind of symbol for the people. In his discussions with other leaders he also found them to have the same sense of her natural value. Thus had it unfolded.

  Sandra was not naïve to these ideas or even the strategies that came from them. She knew that she was being left alone mostly because it was better for the political leadership – in their minds – to do so. She had watched how Reginald Wyler had been carefully bypassed in the process, left to do his normal routine, yes, and with some added notoriety and responsibility related to the asteroid, but not to chair the scientific consortium or be the first scientist contacted by CNN for an update. In keeping with Sandra's direct personality, she had discussed the situation some with Wyler, especially in the first weeks, and realized that he had been subtly bought off by the politicos. They had made it clear to him that Sandra's “discovery” credentials would sell well to the public, as well as her femininity and youth. And they'd added that his ability to properly manage the Keck Observatory would be seriously impaired by adding too much additional direct responsibility related to the asteroid. Those arguments, combined with his natural desire to be in the background, his respect for Sandra, his emotional attachment to her – which had not been referred to by government officials – and his uncertainty as to what would actually come of the asteroid event had been convincing. There was also a kind of implication that was left, to the effect that going out on a limb in speculating about the asteroid, its fragments and what they might mean was somehow more “acceptable” for someone in Sandra's position than in his.

  These details and caveats notwithstanding, Sandra had taken on her role with usual dedication and full concentration. She also felt that she had to continue being herself, functioning for the most part just as she would had the asteroid never appeared in the Keck line of sight. Most of why she rose to the occasion was the enormity of the event itself. It was impossible to imagine anything more important she could do, indeed to have special qualifications to do. Another part of the why was Sandra's well developed sense of confidence. It was a task she did not want to entrust to anyone else. Had she been a man that kind of confidence might have been worn as a badge of authority consistent with her obvious intellectual and decision-making credentials. As a woman, however, she had to be careful not to be seen as arrogant. The charade made her angry, but she understood its nature quite well and had long since been wise enough to make peace with the inevitable for the sake of the possible.

  When Sandra had hit the return key on her computer, sending an answer to those in or controlling Fragment Five she knew perfectly well that she had stepped beyond any bounds that would have been set for her by any political authority on earth. Yet she did it willfully and with full knowledge of the potential repercussions. She could easily imagine how the American president, the U.N. Secretary General, other presidents and prime ministers would react. And she knew that the senior advisors associated with these leaders – as represented by, say, Madeleine Vigola – would perhaps be even more incensed than their superiors. But Sandra had no regrets. There was no moment of “uh oh, what did I do?” Her only decision had been whether to tell Carl before or after she did the deed. Had it been earlier in the day she'd have called him first. In the intricacies of her relationship with the old man was a wish to please him, and it would have been very special to have him and her be the only humans on earth to know – for a few precious moments – that aliens from beyond had sent a message to earth. And in English, of all things! Sandra actually smiled at the thought of it.

  After the three flashes from Fragment Five indicating they'd received her signal, the rock doughnut continued as before passing through the night sky, moving swiftly toward the horizon. The three flashes had been seen, of course, in the control room, and were reported to Sandra. She thanked the team and pulled the signals into her computer for her own detailed look. Soon she would have to let the leaders of the world know what had happened. She would have to let the politicos decide what information would be released and what wouldn't. Most likely she would be sworn to secrecy, even from Carl. So, to sidestep the problem before it arrived, Sandra put together a summary of the data she'd received, including the message from the fragment, her reply and the triple flash that followed, then sent it by encrypted email to her home computer. When it was received she activated the program allowing her to operate her home computer remotely, and sent the unencrypted version straight to Carl's email. He would have an interesting diversion during his morning coffee.

  Back to the data containing the three flashes. Sandra decided she'd work on it a half hour or so, then begin to make her contacts. The logic for the wait would be that she wanted to give the fragment time to respond further during the pass through the Keck's visibility. Her “official” reason for having answered in the first place had been given her by the aliens themselves: they'd used her name. The astronomer wondered if the aliens could possibly understand the subtlety of that argument. Maybe.

  The three flashes were about a second apart – actually twenty-seven frames of video, or more like nine tenths of a second apart. On the video image each appeared identical to the flash that had ended the fragment's first transmission, a full uniformly-lit circle. Sandra pulled up the spectrographic data that summed all the return light from the fragment, separating it by wavelength. She clearly saw the three red peaks, each at 632 nanometers as before. But there was more detail there, she noted. Displaying the final flash from the first transmission alongside the three, she immediately saw that the former was narrower in time, compared to the latter three, and they didn't look identical to each other. Sandra scratched her head. Expanding the scale, the three peaks actually were three different patterns! The first flash, expanded in time, remained a smooth, single pulse of light. Each pattern in the three-flash data was a series of narrow peaks, barely resolved by the sophisticated Keck spectrometer. Are these green men playing games with me? Did they know I was testing them, so now they'll test me some more? Sandra hoped so, but doubted that human traits could be so casually transferred to aliens. The first pattern showed 182 narrow peaks, each about one nanosecond in duration, separated from its fellows by about half a nanosecond. The peaks varied randomly in amplitude. The second pattern also contained 182 peaks also in random amplitude, but with a trend that showed a bit of a dip in the center. The third pattern continued the 182 peak sequence, with a random distribution different than the other two, distorting the overall flash shape noticeably, more perhaps than the first two. It had been this difference in character of the third flash that had first attracted Sandra's attention to the different aspect of the three-flash data.

  I wonder, Sandra thought, if these micro-pulses came from different places around the circle. Had they been fired fast enough – in the roughly one quarter microsecond for each group of 182 pulses in these data – the imaging systems could not have discriminated the locations, all being summed into a single image (which takes around 33 milliseconds to form and be scanned out – a thousand times longer than any of the three flashes!). If, in fact, the aliens had sent her a pattern similar to their first message, but sped up in time, she couldn't read it. Could that have been the reason for the triple flash? To find out what th
e human resolution might be? Maybe they were telling her to do the equivalent of a somersault or whistle a tune, and when she didn't do it they'd know she hadn't fast enough imaging equipment to keep up with them. The notion bothered her. And sounded irritatingly plausible. Yet, as she continued pondering, Sandra had clearly seen 182 micro-pulses per flash. Was that consistency compatible with a message of the type they'd seen before? She doubted it. Further, the amplitudes of the micro-pulses varied. The pulses before, from the various circular positions, had been the same amplitude. Probably, she concluded, they're sending me something new. What is it?

  Sandra noted the time. She gave herself fifteen more minutes. What about these micro-pulses? What were contained in them? She looked at the first fifteen micro-pulses in the first flash. There was no immediate logic in the distribution. What in God's name does that mean?

  She needed a new tack, a new way of evaluating the data. What did the aliens know about humans that they revealed in the first message? They formed Roman letters similar to their appearance in printed matter. Somehow the aliens had seen printed English. But how? It had to be – or probably was, anyway – because of electromagnetic transmissions from earth, either leaked out accidentally from thousands of transmitting antennas or from satellite transmitters, that sort of thing. They also knew how to write English, and therefore could probably read it, so somehow they'd learned the language, again presumably from the transmissions they'd intercepted. They'd even added punctuation marks in their message. Quite sophisticated. Further, they knew her name. They could get it by intercepting news stories, probably piecing together the truth that she, Sandra, had been the person who discovered the asteroid.