by Dean, Warren
"I see," said David. "Hence the trip to the world's biggest radio transmitter."
"Exactly," nodded Edgar. "I figure that we broadcast a message offering to share information about the Faerie Folk. We make it clear that we have suffered at their hands and want to hear from anyone who has had the same experience. If the Faerie Folk were prepared to run roughshod over us, I'm pretty sure they will have done the same to other races. And when those races become aware of us, they will contact us. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that."
"But haven't we been sending messages out into space for decades? Why hasn't anyone responded before?"
Edgar waved his hand airily. "Those messages have contained nothing but generic rubbish. Like spam on the Personet. No-one with any sense responds to spam."
"Isn't there a flaw in your plan?" asked David. "I'm no expert, but won't it take millions of years for a radio message to get to other galaxies?"
Edgar shook his head. "The message doesn't have to go that far. It just needs to spread through our immediate galactic neighbourhood. Anyone who happens to be close by will hear it. The message will include a request to pass it on. It might be picked up by a star ship travelling through. The message will be taken to another galaxy when the ship reaches the other end of whatever wormhole it uses."
David remained unconvinced. "It may still take years before the message gets far enough to have any chance of being picked up."
"That's true, but I have time on my side."
David gave him a sideways glance. "What do you mean?"
"I've had the Faerie Blood injection. I'm going to live for a long time."
David was so surprised he almost lost control of the speeding Aventador. "You? The most vociferous adversary of the Faerie Folk in Boston took a serum they produced? How do you know that the Faerie Blood does what they say it does?"
He shrugged. "As I said, most of what they told us is true. And anyway, it was tested and found to be the same thing as that Forever Gene."
David didn't respond. He found himself beginning to wonder whether the young man was quite right in the head. For someone who distrusted the Faerie Folk as much as he did to happily accept the risk of taking their serum didn't quite add up. "Look, Edgar, I don't want to be sceptical, but are there others at Hat Creek who share your theories? More than just a few hippies, I mean."
"What's a hippie?" asked Edgar.
"Never mind that," said David testily. "I know nothing about you. How do I know you aren't some whacko conspiracy theorist who took a guess and just happened to be proved right?"
Edgar grinned. "I am a conspiracy theorist who took a guess and just happened to be proved right. But I understand what you're saying, man. Look, you can't just walk into Hat Creek and demand that they play a request for you. I have been spreading my idea about a radio signal on the Personet for months. I've had my share of crank responses, but I've also had plenty of solid scientific interest. An ex-director of NASA saw it and said that, if the Faerie Folk weren't prepared to stay and help us sort through our problems, it was sensible to look for help elsewhere. When he took an interest, the idea gained a lot of credibility in the scientific community.
"Once I had some solid backing, I pitched the idea to SETI itself. It took a while, but eventually someone from SETI contacted me and said that it would consider sending my message, provided it was not aggressive or provocative. But SETI is always short of funding so my friends and I would have to make our own way there."
David calmed down a little. He fully intended to check Edgar's story on the Personet when he got the chance, but if people from NASA and SETI were involved, hopefully the whole thing wasn't just pie in the sky. "There is still something I don't understand," he said.
"What's that?"
"On the Personet you said that we could help each other. You need a lift to Hat Creek. But how will going to Hat Creek help me find my wife?"
"It's obvious, man," said Edgar. "When we come into contact with another race, you can ask them to take you."
"Take me?" said David.
"Yes, take you to the Faerie Folk."
"Why would they do that?"
"Why wouldn't they? You could make a deal with them. You go with them and answer all of their questions about Earth and what the Faerie Folk have done. If they are enemies of the Faerie Folk, they will be interested in that information. In exchange, they take you where you want to go. Using wormhole travel, it wouldn't be much more than a minor detour for them."
It seemed like a very faint hope to David. He was tempted to stop the car in the middle of the freeway and kick his passenger out. But that was all he had left now, a faint hope, and he carried on driving. Maybe there were people at Hat Creek who would have more concrete ideas that could help him.
"What about you?" asked Edgar.
"What do you mean?"
"Have you had the Faerie Blood injection too?"
"No, not exactly," said David noncommittally.
"Not exactly? You mean you've had the Forever Gene instead? You have, haven't you? Boy, you must have been rich to afford that. Now that I come to think of it, your face is familiar. I guess you must have been one of those billionaires that were on the Personet all the time. Did you know that the guy who invented the Forever Gene went to MIT? Didn't you say you went to MIT?"
David stared stonily ahead. The young man was beginning to annoy him and they hadn't even crossed the Massachusetts state line yet. He drove in silence for a while, trying to ignore Edgar's furtive glances in his direction. But, whatever else he was, the bearded student wasn't stupid.
"Holy Red Sox," he exclaimed suddenly. "You're David Herald. You're the man who sold the world! You must…" He caught sight of David's expression and immediately tried to backtrack. "Sorry man, I didn't mean to say, that is, er…"
"They lied to me too," said David through gritted teeth. "I thought I was helping them, and I guess I was. I just didn't realise what I was helping them with. They have cost me everything I had and today they took my wife from me too. All I can do now is hope that there is something, or someone, at Hat Creek who can help me find her."
At least Edgar was chastened enough by the exchange to shut up for a while. The car was running low on fuel and David began looking out for places he might fill up. Most of the old service stations were deserted these days and they had to stop and use the spare tank. Eventually, late that night, they came across a truck stop outside Pittsburgh with armed men patrolling the perimeter and long queues of vehicles at the pumps.
David parked at the end of a queue and went inside to barter medicine for fuel. He managed to buy enough to fill the car and two spare tanks. It should get them as far as Omaha, where he was told more fuel would be available.
He and Edgar slept in the queue and the sun had come up by the time they took their turn at the pump. They set off again immediately, driving at a respectable speed to conserve fuel. By midday, David was exhausted and was forced to let Edgar drive. Thankfully, the young man turned out to be an excellent driver and David was able to relax and fall asleep.
They reached Omaha late in the evening and found the promised fuel station. They had to sleep in the queue overnight again, but were able to buy enough fuel to get most of the way to California. The next morning, David decided that it was time to get a move on. He was tired of travelling and anxious to get to Hat Creek. He took Route Eighty and opened up the Aventador, following the road all the way through the Rocky Mountains to Salt Lake City. There Edgar took over again and David slept most of the way through the deserts of Nevada.
At Reno, they were able to buy a little more fuel, their stock of medicine running low, and then they turned north, winding their way through the protected forests of Northern California. They reached the tiny little town of Hat Creek in the early morning, and followed the access road to the radio observatory.
When they finally arrived, David was pleasantly surprised to see that the place was a hive of activity. There
were as many as a dozen vehicles in the parking lot. He climbed stiffly out of the car and stood for a moment admiring the massive Allen Telescope Array spread over the nearby hills; an impressive collection of three hundred and fifty telescopes designed to work in concert. After three decades of delays caused by myriad funding problems, the array had finally been completed in 2028 and was now searching vast tracts of space for evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
Edgar had also climbed out of the Aventador and a small group of admirers began to assemble around the car. David was particularly happy to spot a good number of grizzled veterans with a decidedly technical look about them. Perhaps he had come to the right place after all.
A small, dark-haired girl appeared from the direction of the nearby buildings and ran towards Edgar. She grabbed him in a fierce hug and he looked at David with a big smile. "My girlfriend, Samantha," he grinned.
One of the veterans came over to David and extended his hand. "Clyde Snick," he said. "I'm the director of operations around here."
"David Herald," said David, taking the proffered hand. There was no point in trying to hide who he was. "I hope my name doesn't make me persona non grata around here."
"On the contrary," said Clyde. "We are very interested to hear from someone who has dealt first hand with our friends the Faerie Folk. Come inside and have some breakfast with us. Then you can have a look at what we are planning to do." He bent down and looked through the open window of the Aventador. "And later on, you can take me for a spin in this baby."
David took the opportunity to clean up, before joining Edgar and Samantha for breakfast.
That afternoon, he sat in on a briefing given by Clyde Snick. "As you are aware," said the director, "the final member of our 'Phone ET' team has arrived." He nodded to Edgar who received a smattering of applause and a few mock whoops from his DOPE compatriots. "The message he envisioned has been composed and is ready to go. It has been reduced to binary code, so don't try to read it without a professor of mathematics present." There were a few chuckles.
"Atmospheric conditions are perfect at the moment," he continued, "so tonight's the night." There was more applause. "Be at the shack at eleven hundred hours sharp. We will conduct a few preliminaries and transmit the message at midnight. That is all."
"The shack?" whispered David to Edgar as the briefing broke up. "That doesn't sound too promising."
Edgar didn't have to grin; one had been permanently plastered across his face since he had been reunited with Samantha. "Don't worry, it's not like any shack you've ever seen."
Edgar was certainly right about that. When they walked into Hat Creek's state of the art transmission centre that evening, David had to grin wryly at the misnomer.
Watching the sound engineers go through their protocols, Edgar kept up a running commentary for David's benefit. "The new diodes compress the bandwidth to a millionth of that of ordinary terrestrial frequencies, but the transmission can still go out multi-directionally," he concluded.
"Right," said David. "What does that mean?"
Samantha leaned across her beau's lap from the other side. "It means it's the loudest radio ever built," she said in a stage whisper.
Edgar looked heavenwards in mock exasperation.
When midnight arrived, the transmission began. There was no symbolic throwing of a switch; the whole process was digitally programmed. It wasn't possible to see the actual transmission and the assembled onlookers had to make do with watching a graphic representation on a giant wall-screen.
The message took about two minutes to send and David found the whole thing somewhat anticlimactic. Still, he joined in the applause when Clyde announced that the transmission had been successful and that humanity's plea for help was surging towards the stars. Then he set it to loop continuously and bowed with a flourish. The show was over.
Someone cracked open a few bottles of champagne and began handing out the liquid in a motley variety of glasses, cups and mugs.
David took one and turned to Edgar.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
Edgar shrugged his shoulders. "We wait."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Katya scowled at the two astrophysicists.
"What do you mean it won't work?" she demanded. "How hard can it be to reverse the vector which brought us here?"
Hans sighed. "It isn't that simple, Katya. You see, wormhole travel is not linear. It is not just a matter of reversing the equations. What you have to do is to calculate the reverse polarity of each and every singularity event within…"
Katya rolled her eyes and interrupted him. "I don't follow that mathematical stuff, Hans. You know that. Tell me what the problem is in a language I can understand."
"The problem is that you don't understand the problem," said Hans heatedly.
"No, the problem is that you can't solve the problem," countered Katya.
Hans threw up his hands in frustration.
"I wish you two would just get a room," interjected Harry in exasperation. His comment hit closer to the mark than he'd realised and he wasn't sure which of them reddened more, the astro-geek or the ice queen.
"The problem is not with the equations," he said to Katya in a more soothing tone. "We have done the mathematics over and over again and we think that we have successfully calculated a return vector."
"You think?" she said. "That isn't very reassuring."
"Well, we've never done this before so we cannot be one hundred percent sure. But all of the simulations have been spot on, so we are reasonably certain that the vector is correct."
"So what is the problem then?"
"The problem is a spatial one. In order for a wormhole to take us back to Earth, we have to open it in precisely the same place we arrived."
"Surely we can do that? Can't we calculate our rate and direction of drift since we arrived and reverse it?" Katya still couldn't see what was so difficult.
"It has to be exactly the same spot," said Hans, re-entering the fray more calmly. "Even if we do our best to retrace our course, we cannot possibly account for subtle variations caused by things like stellar radiation and gravity. If we are out by even one kilometre, we could end up thousands of light years away from our intended destination."
Katya stared at him thoughtfully. "So, we can't use the star charts to plot a new wormhole because we know the Faerie Folk have not given us reliable information. And if we simply reverse the wormhole vector that brought us here, we can't be sure we will end up in the right place."
Hans nodded. "Now you're getting it," he said.
"What if we do our best to navigate back to the spot where we came in? Would the return vector get us back to within a few thousand light years from Earth?"
Hans and Harry looked at each other.
"Yes," said Harry patiently. "But we can't bridge such a massive distance with ordinary travel. And we can't plot a wormhole from there because we can't trust the Faerie Folk's charts."
"Why can't we plot one using our own charts?"
Hans took over again. "The information in our charts is millions of years old. You see, our data consists of light emanating from and reflecting off celestial objects. The further away something is, the older our picture of it is."
"Yes, I went to those lectures too, Hans. I know the difference between our star charts and theirs. I realise we can't rely on our charts to open a wormhole from where we are now because we are thirteen million light years away. But the closer we get to Earth, the more up to date our own charts are. If we use the return vector you and Harry have calculated to get us as close to Earth as possible, the information in our charts should be good enough to enable us to safely plot a shorter wormhole back to Earth."
Hans had assumed a faraway expression even before she had finished speaking.
"She might be onto something, Harry," he said after a moment. "It's risky, but it could work. I will have to do some calculations." He turned back to his console, intending to get right to work.
Harry agreed with her wholeheartedly and together they cajoled Hans away from his console and out onto the bridge walkway. They heard voices coming from one of the dining cabins and, when they walked in, saw that there were about three dozen people eating at tables in the spacious room. Katya saw Carson and Vitaly sitting at one of the tables and gave them a brief nod, which they both acknowledged.
The buzz of conversation in the room died as she entered. The 'crew', as she had been calling the people who had been on the ship when it blasted off from the Moon, took her frosty reputation seriously. She decided to take the opportunity to give them an update and strode to the centre of the room. "At ease, everyone, I won't keep you from your dinner. As you know, Dr Mattheus and Dr Hasper have been working on getting us back home all week. I am happy to report that they have successfully calculated a return vector."
There was a smattering of applause and a few cheers. Katya held up her hand. "But, as with all things astronomical, there are a few complications. I won't go into the details now; but it is going to take two or more wormhole jumps to get the ship back to Earth. And with that will come a lot of time-consuming preparation."
There were a few groans.
"But the important thing is that we are going to make it back," she continued. "It is just going to take a little longer than we thought. Harry, what is your best guess?"
Harry considered for a moment. "We need to manoeuvre the ship back to our entry point, run the wormhole simulations again, send a probe to make sure we aren't going to run into anything nasty on the other side, then figure out exactly where we are, plot a second wormhole, and follow the same procedure again. I would say four to six weeks."
There were a few more groans and Katya held up her hand again. "It could be worse, people. We might have damaged our star drive in the wormhole, or been swallowed by a black hole when we arrived, or we could all be sitting in a Chinese prison. I don't think a six week pleasure cruise through galaxies no human has ever seen before is all that much of a hardship. And we don't need to worry about running out of food; this ship is provisioned for sixteen thousand people and there are only one hundred and thirty-seven of us on board. We are the first humans ever to travel intergalactically and every one of you is going to be a celebrity when we get home. Make the most of it."