Dangling Conversations Read online

  At least the Undersecretary-General was unlikely to have heard about Matthews absent input from the US ambassador.

  * * * *

  From the Earth First chat room.

  All_Politics_Is_Local: So what's with the Lalande task force and its closed-door ‘organizational’ meeting?

  Stop_World_Government: What's the UN *always* up to? ET's message is simply another excuse for worldwide government. Whatever the task force is for ... I'm against.

  All_Politics_Is_Local: It's welfare for rich-country scientists. Would a Bangladeshi textile worker think this is the best use for the money?

  Radical_Dude: There's common cause among world-government resistors, ET skeptics, and third-world advocates. Expect the UN to get a taste of what we gave the WTO in Seattle in ‘99.

  CHAPTER 3

  Alex Klein had alerted Dean to the unadvertised coordination between the Russian and American militaries and the steering committee. One thing led to another, and now Matthews was at a Manhattan deli with a Russian general and ex-cosmonaut.

  Vladimir Grigorivich Antinov began his career in the Red Air Force. He'd been an advisor to Hanoi during the Viet Nam War, a time he declined to discuss. He'd graduated to, and risen rapidly in, the then-Soviet strategic rocket forces. Combining piloting and missile expertise, he'd moved into the cosmonaut corps. He'd served two tours aboard Mir, one as mission commander. His English, from years of joint planning with NASA, was excellent.

  After an exchange of pleasantries and the ordering of lunches, Dean got to the point. “To be honest, I'm surprised that the militaries care about ET.”

  Antinov dumped sugar into his tea. “Our job is to worry.”

  “About what? ET is far away.”

  “That is an assumption it is best to validate.”

  Arrival of their sandwiches gave Dean a chance to consider Antinov's rebuttal. ET's signal was quickly recognized as artificial because of the pi factor. That observed wavelength, however, depended on the wavelength originally transmitted and Doppler shift due to relative motion between sender and receiver. Lalande 21185 and the sun moved relative to each other. ET's unseen planet must, like Earth, orbit its sun and rotate about its axis. The signal should have wobbled continuously around its “look at me” wavelength.

  It didn't.

  Without any decoding of content, this observation showed that the message was intended specifically for Earth. It meant that ET saw Earth well enough to measure its orbit and rotation, and then dynamically tune his signal accordingly.

  “In ten years we could have a telescope able to resolve Earth-sized planets of nearby stars,” said Dean. “NASA has requested funding for one for years. ET seeing Earth doesn't require technology much past ours.”

  Antinov waved over the waitress to refill his cup. “Or ET could be much closer. If he can correct a signal for planetary motions, his and ours, he can as easily compensate for blue shift to disguise transmission from an approaching vessel.”

  “But why announce your existence and hide your arrival?”

  “The message may announce a visit. We can't read it yet.”

  Might ET be announcing his arrival? Matthews shoved away his plate, half of a corned beef on rye untouched. He'd heard nothing like this from anyone on the task force. “Since we're discussing this in a deli, you can't be too concerned.”

  “Did I have too much fun with you? I will explain what my people and yours are doing: probing with our most powerful radars along the signal path. These radars can detect the smallest bits of space junk in Earth orbit. We can track a dropped bolt that is hundreds of kilometers high. More than once,” the cosmonaut smiled, “that has been a useful capability. We would expect to detect a starship much farther away. As yet, there has been no return pulse.”

  Matthews had never worked with military radar, but thought he could make an intelligent guess at its sensitivity from an understanding of radio telescopes. “If ET is coming, he's still well outside our solar system. Or stealthed.”

  Antinov winked at the mention of stealth. “I commend your newfound paranoia, though in this case such caution may be excessive. To visit us, a vessel must travel at very high speed through the scattered matter that makes interstellar space only a near vacuum. Could a ship maintain stealthiness against the ongoing particle bombardment? Would it not radiate, whether from collisions with such particles or some protective force field? We've seen no such evidence.

  “We've even used the comet watcher trick of flipping back and forth between telescope photographs taken on successive nights of the same part of the sky. There are no unexpected moving objects, nor any unexpected occluded stars.”

  “You have been busy.”

  “We do only what your Space Command has done, I think.”

  Matthews grabbed the check. “So are you convinced that the signal is genuine, and from Lalande 21185?”

  “It has been a most pleasant discussion, but duty calls.” Antinov stood. “As for your question, I am almost convinced.

  “I am entirely certain that were ET able to sneak up on us, nothing we could do in preparation would matter.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “...And still no comment from the UN investigation. Has ET's signal been lost? If so, what does it mean? Is the UN covering up? We want to hear from you.”

  The radio call-in show was Dean's regular breakfast companion, entertaining when he successfully compartmentalized the sorry implications about the state of education. Today's show was annoying rather than amusing, however—even though, oddly enough, it had the facts mostly correct.

  The signal from Lalande 21185 had vanished last night.

  He retrieved today's paper from the curb. Loss of signal was front-page news, with attribution to the SETI Institute, the Planetary Society, and Cal Tech. As he'd foreseen, universities and science-interest groups had built their own antenna arrays—and they were free to announce findings when they pleased. That usually meant only a phone call to a buddy at a peer institution to confirm an observation or analysis.

  He'd phoned Ricard after getting an alert from Signals, urging the committee head to issue a statement. Ricard instead ruled that the matter needed a Media & Education consensus recommendation to the steerers. Damned committee process!

  He stuffed the paper into his briefcase. There'd be time for it on the shuttle to New York for the emergency meeting.

  * * * *

  The early work of Media & Education had lulled Matthews into a false sense of security: the task force's original findings were uncontroversial, and so quickly released. For those first few days they'd also had a monopoly on signal reception.

  Things started changing once independent observatories came on-line and the bulk of the repeating message was posted to the Web. Now the task force was in a race with every other interested party to interpret ET's message.

  That message started simply enough: two pulse trains counting from one to 128. Next came hours of data without apparent pattern. The analysts soon recognized that the data immediately following the two pulse trains of 128 was a two-dimensional, 128-by-128 pixel image. The image was simple but informative: sets of tick marks, from one to sixteen, each set paired with alien symbols. ET was communicating by what amounted to facsimile transmission, he counted in octal, and he had shown Earth how he wrote his numerals—a quickly approved press release.

  The bottom left corner of that first image carried ET's symbol for one: he was enumerating images. The bottom right corner bore two numbers: 128 twice. As suggested, the next part of the message could be read as another 128-by-128 image.

  Subsequent images were easily recognized as math lessons, building a common mathematical vocabulary. None of the symbols matched human conventions, of course, but there were no surprises at that early stage as to message meaning. The committee had little difficulty drafting a press release citing a shared view of arithmetic.

  Contention arose with the next few images, perhaps not coincidentally because an u
ndergrad physics major at the University of Calgary was first to interpret them. She identified one drawing as a spectrogram, an energy-intensity versus frequency plot, of Lalande 21185. The next graphic was a similar spectrogram for the sun.

  Beyond confirming the source and destination of ET's communication, those images introduced two new symbols: us and them. The solar spectrogram had one other novel aspect: a corner annotation indicating that a 3-D dataset followed. The 3-D dataset appeared to be a series of spectrograms, successively more crowded, but otherwise mysterious. The net effect was a crude animation, like a child's flip book. The meaning of the dataset's third dimension remained unclear. Intriguingly, each 2-D slice bore the symbol for “us.”

  The committee was slow to comment on these images. The media types (and Matthews agreed) proposed simply stating that two new symbols had been decoded, but that the following dataset was not yet understood. The behavioral-response contingent thought it necessary to put these findings “into a suitable context” to protect fragile human egos. “To those countries that were recently colonies of the West, ‘us and them’ distinctions are sensitive matters,” was one Third World sociologist's assertion. The behavioral-response folks were further concerned that an admission “'we’ had failed to understand” a dataset could make humans feel inferior to, hence threatened by, ET.

  Matthews just didn't get their point: “us” and “them” were just pronouns. An undecoded dataset so early in the effort also failed to faze him ... why should ET's message be immediately clear? ET was alien. They waffled for two days, by which time the external media had moved on to newer news.

  * * * *

  Waiting for the emergency meeting to start, Matthews wondered if the committee had learned its lesson. The loss of signal was already widely known; he felt they should just acknowledge it.

  Ricard had inexplicably brought a gavel, which he wielded to open the meeting. Some overseas members, unable to join the short-notice session in person, were videoconferenced in by encrypted network link; they winced as the chairman pounded too close to the mike.

  “Thank you all for coming.” After excessive pleasantries, Ricard came to the point. “It has been reported that the signal from ET has been lost. The matter being so important, we will discuss a suitable statement for recommendation to the steering committee.” Heads nodded.

  “Point of clarification,” interrupted Matthews. “A more precise statement is that the signal has ceased. Every observatory, government-funded and other, reports the same thing.” He'd been on-line for much of his flight; the message boards were unanimous about the time that the signal had disappeared. It hadn't faded or been randomly garbled by cosmic interference, both of which had often happened. The signal was just gone.

  “Do we know why?” asked someone.

  “The short and honest answer is: no. On the ‘net, the most common guess is that ET's orbit is bringing him to the side of his sun opposite us, so he's stopped sending until he can get a clean signal through again. Perhaps, once we've decoded the entire message, he'll have told us.”

  In a pleasant surprise, reason won out. The not-too-tardy press release simply reported the cessation of transmission.

  * * * *

  “You've got incoming.”

  For a Brit, Bridget had a fair grasp of American slang. Matthews still reserved judgment whether he had cause to worry.

  He was nonetheless suspicious. It was eight in the evening for him, making it the middle of the night in Switzerland. Moreover, she'd contacted him over the ‘net, and Internet telephony had far lower voice quality than a normal call.

  The task force had provided its members with PC-compatible encryption devices of unusual robustness, which he guessed she wanted to use. That turned out to be correct.

  “What's up?” he asked once they'd opened a secure session.

  “You know there are ITU staffers on the Signals committee. One gave me a sneak preview of their latest finding. You'll surely hear all about it in Media. Judging from the tizzy your friends got into over ‘us’ and ‘them,’ this news is sure to throw them for a circle. A head's up seemed in order.”

  For a loop, he thought to himself. “What is it?”

  “Watch.”

  She opened two windows on his PC. In a red window she ran the animation of ET's “us"-labelled spectral flip book. The other window, colored green, showed a similar sequence of images. She slid the second window over the first, and re-ran them superimposed. The green charts were in all cases a superset of the red.

  “Green is our best-guess reconstruction of Earth's aggregated RF emissions over time. The big energy spikes are from TV transmitters and ballistic missile early warning radars.”

  “When does your animation start?”

  She grinned at him from the corner of his screen still showing real-time video. “The best fit matches ET's spectrum animation with our reconstructed data starting in mid 1950.”

  She had used the term “incoming” correctly: ET had lobbed a figurative bombshell at them.

  * * * *

  Apropos of the New York venue, it was deja vu all over again: another short-notice Media meeting. So far, only the task force had the explosive news. If Media moved quickly, this time they could shape the world's impressions.

  ET had in 1958 captured signals emitted by Earth in 1950. He'd waited more than thirty years to respond. Why?

  “It's devastating,” said Dr. Shah, a psychologist, “that ET could not be bothered to answer. Are we so insignificant?”

  Thanks to Bridget, Matthews had had a day to ponder the matter. “A purposefully delayed response is not the only explanation. Perhaps ET is just explaining how Earth came to his attention. His radio astronomers might routinely capture and save radio energy from neighboring stars, and not have immediately recognized our ‘signal’ “—he waggled his fingers as exaggerated quotation marks—"for what it was.

  “ET sent us a systematically constructed message, much of which we almost instantly understood. He sent it at very high power levels. Whatever signal he's gotten from Earth was much weaker, unintended leakage from TV and radio and military radars. None of that was designed for him to recognize or decode. I'm guessing, but what may have eventually convinced him that we're here and aware is the rapid increase in power levels and in frequencies being used. I doubt ET extracted any meaning from the mish-mash.”

  Dr. Shah imitated Matthews’ earlier gesture. “About those quotation marks ... what did you mean?”

  “The signals ET received from us were very faint. ‘I Love Lucy’ was not meant as an interstellar communication. If ET's signal were as low-powered as what Earth emits, we'd never have detected it.”

  Michel Margot, a Belgian sociologist, broke the thoughtful silence that had come over the committee. “You suggest that we can't know how long ET delayed after suspecting our presence.”

  Matthews nodded.

  “But his radio technology is more advanced than ours.”

  “Correct.”

  “But not greatly more advanced, or his response would likely have come sooner.” Margot took Matthews’ silence as assent. “That's good. There could be an adverse reaction to a perceived technology gap.” To the group, the sociologist added, “This seems a responsible position to articulate.”

  Heads bobbed in what Chairman Ricard mistook for unanimous agreement. He assigned a writer to draft a press release.

  The phrase “not greatly more advanced” contained a significant degree of ambiguity. ET had radio receivers in 1958 exceeding any Earth owned today. His high-power transmitter was a marvel. In the interest of an announcement more devoid than usual of spin, Matthews kept to himself the thought of how much he'd like to obtain ET's radio technology.

  * * * *

  "In the General Assembly today, the Secretary-General of the United Nations urgently requested an emergency supplemental authorization. He stated that the UN's budget has been unusually strained by peacekeeping duties across the Bal
kans, sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Indonesia. He pointed to growing requests for humanitarian assistance by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. The Lalande 21185 task force was also identified as an unanticipated expense.

  "Third World delegates responded skeptically, suggesting that the UN reallocate scarce resources to its core missions. The ambassador of Congo spoke for many of his peers. ‘What is the use of an arithmetic lesson from the stars? How many AIDS vaccinations, how much famine relief, could we provide with funds we are now squandering on ET?’

  "Rising polarization on the subject of funding for the Lalande investigation seems certain to conflict with the proposed international treaty on interstellar communications. The treaty, recently passed by the General Assembly and awaiting ratification by member states, requires that any response to ET come under UN auspices.”

  —BBC World New Service

  CHAPTER 5

  “To ET.”

  Matthews rarely toasted with iced tea, but Barbara White seldom drank anything stronger. Barb stood five foot zip in high heels; she said her tolerance for booze was best measured in thimblefuls.

  “To NetSat.”

  Barb was CEO and founder of that company. He had been employee number four before going on leave of absence. They went back a long time together.

  It had been a chance encounter at the shopping mall. They'd retreated to the food court. “Is ET still being mum?”

  “Yup.” He bit a taco. “Not that it could be kept secret if he began talking again. In any case, it'll be a while before we understand what he already had to say.”

  “So when can I expect you back?”

  “I can't tell yet.” Pause. “Not till we're done.”

  She knew him too well. “What's the problem?”

  “What we're learning is astounding. For example, ET's replay of what he received from Earth will teach us a lot about radio propagation across interstellar distances. And I work every day with brilliant people.”