The Hercules Text Read online

  Gambini explained between mouthfuls of steak. “We don’t know what to expect,” he said. “It’s logical to assume that there’ll be a second phase to the transmission, since the acquisition signal does nothing more than alert us to their presence. A civilization able to manhandle that pulsar may be capable of damned near anything. And by the way, Harry, there’s good reason to suspect that they are able to manipulate the pulsar, whether they use a screen or not. Anyhow, we’d like to try to get a look at their neighborhood.”

  Wheeler finished his drink. “Ed, I take it we’re sitting on this little bombshell.”

  “Rosenbloom wants to wait awhile before we announce anything.”

  “Exactly the right course,” Wheeler said, looking hard at Gambini, who did not respond.

  Later, while the project manager was in the washroom, Harry asked the priest what he thought about the Hercules signal. “Are there people on the other end?”

  Wheeler tried to attract the attention of their waiter. “It’s hard to argue with the evidence. I don’t know what’s out there, any more than anyone else does. But, Harry, we’re talking about something we all want very much to find. And that automatically makes Ed’s conclusions suspect. Let’s wait awhile and see what happens.”

  Harry pushed the food around on his plate. “What could cause a signal of that type? Naturally, I mean.”

  The waiter arrived, and Wheeler ordered coffee for everyone. “I haven’t the slightest idea. But I can tell you what it isn’t: it isn’t what Gambini thinks it is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Harry, do you know what a pulsar is?”

  “It’s a collapsed star that blinks.”

  The priest peered closely into Harry’s eyes. “It’s the corpse of a supernova. A supernova, Harry. Gambini himself tells me they’re estimating it happened less than six million years ago.” He caught up a few peanuts, dropped one, and swallowed the others. “A blast of that magnitude would either incinerate or scatter any planetary group that existed. If anybody’s out there with a radio transmitter, he doesn’t have a world to sit on.”

  “Rosenbloom raised that point,” Harry said.

  “It’s a valid objection.”

  Two twenty-four-meter telescopes overlook the west wall of the Champollion Crater at thirty-seven degrees north latitude, on the far side of the moon; two more are under construction near the Mare Ingenii in the southern hemisphere. The Champollion reflectors are the heart of SKYNET. Functioning in tandem with an Earth-orbiting array of eight 2.4-meter Space Telescopes, they are fully capable of reaching to the edge of the observable universe.

  The system, which was barely two years old, had been completed only after a long struggle over financing. There’d been internal bickering, delays, cost overruns, and, in the end, political problems. The flap over the creation event had heavily damaged efforts to fund the second pair of telescopes; the discovery that planetary systems out to more than a hundred light-years were as desolate and devoid of life as the moons of Jupiter had guaranteed that the imagination of the taxpayer, and consequently the interest of the politician, would not be engaged.

  SKYNET also included a system of radio and X-ray telescopes and, for enhancement, a bank of computers whose capabilities were believed to be second only to those of the National Security Agency. When operating as a fully coordinated optical unit—in other words, when all ten reflectors were locked onto the same target—the system could magnify remote objects more than four hundred thousand times. During SKYNET’s early months of operation, Harry had stood under the monitors with Gambini and Majeski and Wheeler, silently absorbing the blue-white curve of majestic Rigel, the vast trailing filaments of the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the fog-shrouded surface of the terrestrial world Alpha Eridani. They’d been rousing days, filled with promise and excitement. The investigators, the news media, and the general public had all got caught up in a near frenzy of expectation. Harry had been forced to put on four extra people in the public relations office to answer telephones and quash rumors. But he, like everyone else, had been carried along by the rising tide.

  But the big news never came: the long bleak winter was filled with the increasingly familiar patterns of carbon dioxide spectrograms. And in April, with the coming of spring, Ed Gambini had broken down.

  Linda Barrister, who manned the comm link, was talking softly to NASCOM when Harry followed Gambini and the others into the operations center. She smiled prettily, spoke again into the phone, and looked up at the project manager. “They’re still a few minutes from calibration, Doctor.”

  Gambini nodded and took a position near the communications monitor, where he quickly tired of waiting and began to wander through the spaces, holding brief whispered conversations with the technicians.

  Majeski went back into ADP.

  Wheeler fell comfortably into a chair.

  “You don’t expect much out of this, do you, Pete?” asked Harry.

  “Out of Optical? No, not really. But who knows? Listen: last year I’d have denied the possibility of a free-floating binary. There are a few questions to be answered here.”

  Two technical assistants, both bearded, fortyish, and overweight, pulled their earphones down on their necks and bent forward over their consoles.

  Somewhere, probably in one of the workrooms, a radio was playing Glenn Miller. Harry leaned against a supply cabinet. Directly overhead, an auxiliary monitor was flashing sequences of numbers more quickly than the eye could follow. “It’s the satellite,” Barrister explained. “TDRSS.” That would be the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System. “It’s the X-ray signal from Hercules.”

  She touched a slim finger to her right earphone. “Champollion’s locked in,” she said.

  Gambini, who was trying to retain his customary dignity, trembled. Despite the air conditioning, damp crescents stained his shirt. He moved closer to Linda’s monitor.

  “We’re getting a signal,” she said.

  The lights dimmed.

  Majeski came back into the room.

  Wheeler pulled off his plaid sweater and tossed it into the supply cabinet.

  “Recording,” said one of the bearded technicians.

  The monitor darkened, and a red point of light appeared at its center, framed in a starfield. Someone exhaled, and there was a general rustling throughout the several rooms of the operations center.

  “They’re foreground stars, most of them,” Pete whispered. “Probably a couple of galaxies in there, too.”

  “Mag is two-point-oh,” said Barrister. That was a magnification of two hundred thousand.

  “Take it in,” said Gambini.

  The peripheral objects rotated forward off the screen; the red star, Alpha Altheis, brightened.

  “It wouldn’t be a good place to live,” said Wheeler.

  Harry did not take his eyes from the monitor. “Why not?”

  “If there were a world, there’d be no stars in its sky. The moon would be red; the sun’s being eaten.”

  “Three-oh,” said Barrister.

  “A culture that developed under those conditions—”

  “—would,” observed Majeski, “sure as hell be God-fearing.”

  Harry couldn’t see Wheeler’s reaction, but there was no softness in Majeski’s voice.

  The red light that was Alpha Altheis grew brighter. Then someone across the room grunted. “What the hell’s that?” Gambini, trying to get closer, stumbled over something in the dark, but popped back up without missing a beat.

  A yellow pinprick had appeared west of the giant star.

  “Spectrograph,” snapped Gambini.

  Barrister checked her instruments. “Three-six,” she said.

  Wheeler was out of his chair. He laid a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “There’s a third star in the system.”

  “Class G,” said the analyst. “No readings yet on mass. Absolute magnitude six-point-three.”

  “Not very bright,” said Gambini. “No wonder we
missed it.”

  Harry grinned at Wheeler. “There goes your supernova problem,” he said. “Now we know where the planets are.”

  “No, I don’t think so. If that class G is part of the system—which, out there, it damned well would have to be—the explosion would have taken out its worlds, too. Still—” Wheeler looked perplexed. He turned toward Gambini. “Ed—?”

  “I see it, Pete,” said the project manager. “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  Harry could make out nothing but the two stars, a bright sharp ruby and a dull yellow point of light. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “There should be a shell of gas around the system,” said Wheeler. “Some remnant of the supernova. Ed, I don’t understand this at all.”

  Gambini was slowly shaking his head. “There’s been no supernova here.”

  Wheeler’s voice was barely audible. “That’s not possible, Ed.”

  “I know,” Gambini said.

  MONITOR

  …The sites at Champollion and Mare Ingenii for the fixed 24-meter telescopes were chosen to provide an optimum number of objects both within and outside the Milky Way which could be simultaneously targeted by both units. This capability will permit a degree of image enhancement approximately 30 percent beyond that of either unit acting alone. (The percentage declines somewhat when the fixed telescopes are employed as part of the overall system of fixed and orbiting units; but even under these circumstances, the improvement would be considerable.)

  A fully operational SKYNET will open the entire observable universe to direct examination. It will constitute a stride of incalculable value, of far more benefit to the species than any other imaginable project now technologically within our reach. Even a mission to Alpha Centauri pales in contrast.

  In light of the funds that have already been expended on SKYNET and the relatively modest sum that would be required to complete the system, we urge—

  —From NASA’s Annual Report to the President

  …Let us look at the facts:

  We know that, beyond this Earth, the Universe is unremittingly hostile, a place brutally hot or brutally frigid, a place that is mostly void, with a few rocks and some hot gas adrift. It is the sort of place that some Northerners might want to visit, but it holds little interest for Tennesseans.

  We know also that even NASA can no longer provide a shadow of any tangible benefit to be derived from examining boulders so far away that light from them cannot reach us during a man’s lifetime.

  And we also face the stark fact that the Government would like to spend an additional $600 million to complete the telescopes based at Mare Ingenii. Their argument for doing so seems to be that, having already wasted so much on the project, it would be unconscionable not to waste some more.

  The time has come to call a halt.

  —Editorial, Memphis Herald (September 12)

  …The reality of it all may be that our concepts have so thoroughly outstripped our technology that the latter can no longer keep up. Case in point: SKYNET.

  Theoretically, it should be possible to use the techniques I have described in this paper to create a magnetic lens whose diameter would be equal to the diameter of Earth’s orbit. This lens could be manipulated to create a focal point in the same manner that a glass lens does. One hesitates to speculate on the sort of magnification such an achievement would permit. And while we cannot yet construct such a device, there is, in principle, no reason why it should not work.

  —Baines Rimford, Science (September 2)

  3

  BAINES RIMFORD STOOD on a wooded hill out near the rim of the Milky Way, looking toward galactic center. He could sense the majestic rotation of the great wheel and the balance of gravity and angular momentum that held it together. Relatively few stars were visible over the lights of Pasadena, hurtling down their lonely courses.

  The sun completes an orbit every 225 million years. During this latest swing around the galaxy, pterodactyls had flown and vanished; the ice had advanced and retreated, and near the end of the long circuit, men had appeared. Against that sort of measure, what is a man’s life? It had occurred to Rimford, at about the time he approached fifty, that the chief drawback in contemplating the enormous gulfs of time and space that constitute the bricks and mortar of the cosmologist is that one acquires a dismaying perception of the handful of years allotted a human being.

  To what microscopic extent had the sun depleted its store of hydrogen since he’d sat reading about Achilles and Prometheus on the front porch of his grandfather’s row home in South Philadelphia? How much deeper was the Grand Canyon?

  He was suddenly aware of his heartbeat: tiny engine of mortality whispering in his chest. It was one with the spinning galaxies and the quantum dance, as he was one with anything that had ever raised its eyes to the stars.

  It was in good condition, his heart, as much as could be expected for a mechanism designed to self-destruct after a few dozen winters.

  Somewhere below, lost in the lights of Lake Avenue, a dog barked. It was a cool evening: the air conditioners were off, and people had their windows open. He could hear fragments of the Dodgers game. Pasadena was, if more prosaic, at least more sensible than the universe. One knew why traffic lights worked, and where it had all come from. And, taken from the perspective of Altadena and Lake, the Big Bang seemed rather unlikely.

  Curious: in the days when he had been constructing the cosmic model that bore his name, many of his creative insights had come while he stood atop a hill like this one on the edge of Phoenix. But what he remembered most clearly from those solitary excursions was not the concepts, but the dogs. While he juggled matter and hyperbolic space, the night had seemed full of barking dogs.

  It was getting late. The comet and the moon were both low in the west. Rimford wasn’t much interested in comets, and he couldn’t understand people who were. There was, he felt, little to be learned from such an object, other than the trivia of its composition.

  He started slowly down the hill, enjoying the cool night air and the solitude. Near a cluster of palms, about a hundred yards from the top, there was a spot from which he could see his house. Like a child, he always stopped to savor its warm light and familiar lines. All in all, he had little of which to complain. If life was desperately short, it had been nevertheless good.

  There was a story in Herodotus of a Greek philosopher who’d visited an Asian kingdom, where the ruler inquired of him who was happiest among men? The philosopher understood that the king himself wished to be thought of as occupying that enviable position. But the visitor had other ideas. “Perhaps,” he replied, “it might be a farmer of my acquaintance, who lived near Athens. He had fine children, a wife who loved him, and he died on the field of battle defending his country.” Rimford didn’t expect to see any armed combat, but he had nevertheless waged the good fight, not for a particular flag, but for humanity.

  In the dark, his lips curved into a smile. He was feeling satisfied with himself. The probability was that the Rimford universe would one day join Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics as a system with much to recommend it, but in the end inadequate. It didn’t matter. When the great strides of the twentieth century were being counted, they would know that Rimford had been there. And if he and Hawking and Penrose had got some of it wrong, or even much of it wrong, they’d made the effort.

  He was content.

  His colleagues expected him to retire shortly. And possibly he would. He had sensed the decline of his conceptual abilities recently: equations that had once been visions were reduced to mathematics. His creative work was over, and it was time to step aside.

  Agnes was on the phone when he walked in. “He’s here now,” she said into the instrument. She held it out to him with a wink. “Ed Gambini,” she said. “I think he needs help.”

  Leslie Davies drove in Monday evening from Philadelphia, spent the night with friends in Glen Burnie, and proceeded next morning down the Baltimore
-Washington Expressway to Goddard.

  The Space Flight Center is nestled among the close-cropped hills and sober middle-class homes of Greenbelt, Maryland. The complex consists of seven office buildings, eleven laboratories, and several support structures, spread across a rolling tract of almost twelve hundred acres. There are a few dish antennas, mounted on concrete aprons and on rooftops; a water tower; and a visitors’ center. The overall impression is less of a high-tech space-age facility than of a small military base.

  She identified herself at the front gate. They gave her a temporary plate, logged her in, and provided directions to the Research Projects Laboratory.

  Leslie had no idea why she’d been asked to come to Goddard. Gambini had been secretive over the phone, and she suspected that they were having some serious problems with their personnel. She’d read the research and was aware that people in technological professions, and particularly in the space sciences, scored quite high in stress analysis surveys. Worse, there was evidence in a wide variety of studies that the types of personalities drawn into these occupations tend to be unstable to begin with.

  But even if people were coming apart here, why they should choose to come to her was a mystery. God knows, there were plenty of experienced shrinks in D.C., and undoubtedly a few with the right specialty.

  Whatever it was, though, she was glad for the change of pace. She’d been doing cross-discipline research on the nature of consciousness for a Penn study group, and having a difficult time. Moreover, her practice, which was limited to two mornings a week, wasn’t going well. She’d begun to suspect that she wasn’t really helping her patients, and she was too good a psychologist to hide that fact from herself.

  A well-tailored young woman met her at the entrance to the lab and inquired whether she’d had any trouble finding the Space Center. She got a visitor’s badge and was led down one floor. “They’re waiting for you now,” her guide said. Leslie repressed an urge to ask who was waiting for her, and why.

  They turned left into a short corridor. Voices spilled out of an open door ahead, and she recognized Ed Gambini’s studied diction.