This week starts an attempt at hard SF; a three-part story that takes place around Gliese 581c, famous earlier this year as the first extra-terrestrial planet discovered that has the spectral signature of water.
They had finished cataloging two large and thirty-nine small moons circling 581D, completing the flyby, and were turning their attention to the inner planets when Raaj Penstock asked Centavi Mbolo to drift over to his workstation.
“What is it?”
“Look for yourself,” he insisted. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy.”
The tall woman with the shaved head and the nu-clan tattoos leaned down to the eyepiece. The scope targeted Gliese 581C, 2.95 Earth masses, once briefly famous as the first exo-planet discovered capable of harboring liquid water. After thirty seconds, she lifted her face, turned to the keypad and typed in a series of inquiries. She studied the output for nearly two minutes, and said, “That’s not possible. Is it?”
Penstock was a squat man whose normal, affected British accent disappeared under stress. Two months before the Zheng He launched from Earth, they had enjoyed a brief, passionate fling that neither could remember.
“Forget whether or not it’s possible. What does it look like to you?”
Mbolo fingered a design on her cheek, idly tracing its curl down toward her chin; there was another tattoo swirling around her neck, but she didn’t know how it had gotten there, and never touched it. “It looks like a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, is what it looks like.”
“That’s what I thought, too. We’d better tell the Captain.”
“The hell with the Captain. We’d better tell Rothmann.”
Hoobart Rothmann was the enfant terrible theoretical physicist who developed the Rothmann Negative Mass Drive, and whose fortune had bankrolled the mission to Gliese 581. Nobody liked Rothmann The standing joke among the crew was that they were the only people who had ever spent twenty years in proximity to Hoobart Rothmann without trying to kill him—although doing so required them to be in Coldsleep.
Raaj took the lead in attempting to explain what they had discovered, “Sir, this thing checks out as a Class Four communications satellite. It appears to be the same configuration that we’re carrying for deployment into the same orbit.”
Rothmann was a florid, pudgy man, whose features simultaneously seemed regular and scrambled. He sneered a lot.
“Which just happens to be orbiting 581C when we arrive? Far more likely, Penstock, that some cretin on the observation staff has decided a little practical joke is in order. When I find out who to blame for this outrage, they will be having a very long year.”
“Then verify it yourself, Doctor Rothmann, if you don’t believe us,” Mbolo snapped. “We were extending a professional courtesy by informing you of what we found. You can act on it or not, but neither Raaj nor I are going to stay here and take your abuse.”
“Professional courtesy exists between intellectual and professional equals. Subordinates such as yourself are merely expected to do your jobs competently without getting in the way. So get out of my quarters and try to make yourself useful somewhere else.”
They took the sighting to Captain Kirk Leath, a lean man who wore a perpetually amused look. Leath asked a series of polite but penetrating questions, and then sent Penstock and Mbolo back to their stations for a full workup. Ogda Chien, the mission’s cosmologist and back-up astrographer, appeared soon after, and became drawn into the mystery. Within hours, all seventeen people aboard knew about the sighting, and speculation ran rampant.
Rothmann remained isolated in his quarters.
Nineteen hours later, Captain Leath used a proprietary code to override the privacy lock-out on the physicist’s door. Without preamble, he said, “Professor Rothmann, this is neither a prank nor an equipment malfunction. As Penstock and Mbolo told you yesterday, there appears to be a communications satellite orbiting the planet.”
Rothmann stared at him as if the potato on his plate had just engaged him in conversation. He said, “All right, Captain. Let’s assume for the moment that your underlings have found something in orbit. Of four possibilities, one is still that this so-called satellite is either a ghost in your machine or a piece of juvenile humor. Perhaps your astrography staff has misidentified a tiny moon. Only after those are completely ruled out do we have an artificial satellite. Then we determine its origin, which is more likely to be alien than a human satellite that somehow wandered twenty light years out of the solar system.”
“Then, sir, how would you suggest we proceed?”
“That is the first intelligent question anyone has yet asked. I gave the matter the ten minutes of thought that it deserved yesterday,” Rothmann said, turning away and touching his keypad. “I’ve sent you a detailed protocol, both in terms of determining whether this is in fact a hoax, and in narrowing down the origin of the item. For a start, everyone should stop referring to this object as a communications satellite—such a premature conclusion will prejudice your ability to see what’s actually there.”
Leath retreated. Dealing with Rothmann always made him feel disoriented, perhaps even daunted. He knew that Rothmann did not like him, and had originally vetoed his selection as mission commander. His record, however, had been good enough that Deep Space Exploratory Command insisted on Leath’s assignment as back-up commander during train-up. Sometime during the six months prior to launch, he had replaced Captain Masood. Nobody on board—Leath included—knew why.
Coldsleep had merged late 21st Century understandings of cryogenics with neuropsychological research on comatose and permanently vegetative trauma victims. Even before the Slingshot mission to Alpha Centauri, Coldsleep had delivered colonists to Mars, Vesta, Ganymede, and Titan economically and safely (a fatality rate of less than .001%). Extensive testing had discovered only one significant side effect: the necessary preliminary injections wiped out the subject’s last five or six months’ memory prior to chill-down. Thus Penstock and Mbolo did not recall their affair, technician Jahn Boone didn’t know the sex of his first grandchild, and even Rothmann would have lacked any memory of the critical responses to his last paper on solving the Takai Transforms.
Despite his uncertainties about the reasons why he had awoken light years away from Earth rather than in the control chambers a year after the Zheng He’s launch, Leath took his obligations as mission commander seriously—more seriously in fact than Rothmann would have preferred. Leath had considered, for instance, that while the professional crew aboard was first-rate, none of the other scientists belonged to the top tiers of their profession. Ogda Chien was a second-string cosmologist, Phineen Slattery an exo-biologist with only minor publication credentials, and Andrej Malvoux a planetary climatologist past the prime he may never have had. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Hoobart Rothmann desired no intellectual competition during his year in the Gliese system.
Leath did not, therefore, ignore Rothmann’s protocols, because he doubted that anyone else aboard could have generated anything better. Instead, he initiated them without crediting their source. Everyone might have suspicions, yet suspicions were not certainty, and the resultant ambiguity allowed the work to continue without too much rancor. By the time the ship cleared 581D’s surprisingly strong magnetic field, Mbolo picked up a faint transponder code, which almost matched that of their own satellites waiting in the hold for deployment.
Almost, but not quite.
“The signal compression rate’s just a hair different,” Boone said. “The identification code has sixteen digits, not fourteen.”
Per the protocols, a rigorous search for other signal sources ensued before Leath would authorize transmitting a dump query to the satellite. Likewise, the Zheng He altered course to drop below the ecliptic and pass around the tidally locked, sun-facing hemisphere of Gliese 581B before swinging around into proximity with the anomaly. The captain approved of this cautious approach. If there was anybody out there, Leath wanted to know as soon as possible.
Apparently there wasn’t.
Unfortunately, the dump query also failed to stimulate the comsat into downloading its core memory. Leath ordered a shuttle dispatched for Boone to dump the satellite’s memory manually. Everyone except Rothmann found themselves glued to a screen as the technician approached his prey.
“This is pretty damn strange, Captain,” Boone reported. “According to the access panel markings this is a Siemens Class Four, Mark Seven, Communications Satellite.”
“Why is that so strange?”
There was a short pause before Boone replied.
“Well, sir, it’s like this. The ones we’ve got are Siemens Mark Fives, and when we left home that was the latest model available.”
Leath tried to ignore the spreading chill in the pit of his stomach.
“Boone, do you think you’ll be able to conduct a manual dump?”
“Let’s see. Yeah, I think so. The couplings are the same. Get in there you little bugger. The keypad’s also the same. C’mon baby, listen to papa.”
A long minute passed. From the workstation to Leath’s right, Lieutenant Dany Detroit said, “Good work, Boone, I’m receiving data.”
Leath allowed himself a brief smile, felt the cold within him lessen just bit, until the technician said, “Uh, Captain, there’s a product run identifier on the inside of this panel. It says that the satellite was produced in 2217.”
Glaciers surged forward inside him. The Zheng He had departed Earth on 2194; according to the vessel’s mainframe (which told time based on calculating the observed time onboard at .995 C during the trip as registered by a cesium-decay clock and comparing that to predicted time-dilation caused by their velocity), on Earth right now it was 2215.
This satellite wouldn’t be built for two more years.
“There are really only four viable solutions to this problem.”
Rothmann loved an audience more than anything, which explained why people outside the scientific community thought he was urbane, charming, and witty. They’d only known him through netcasts, and had been spared his pre-show green room rages when the sauvignon blanc wasn’t properly chilled. With everyone onboard tuning in, he reverted to his media persona.
“Possibility number one is that we encountered some kind of space-time fold during our voyage here. Those of you who have been following my work on the Takai Transforms will recall that several theorists have proposed this solution as a possible answer. Entering such a fold would transport you not only in space, but in time as well. That would only leave the question of whether or not we have actually exited the fold.”
“Something as large as the Gliese system could be caught in one of these folds?” Penstock asked.
Rothmann was magnanimous; he doted on questions that gave him to opportunity to clarify theoretical physics for the masses. “Actually, Takai speculated that if such folds existed they could be large enough to contain entire galaxies, which might explain any number of observational anomalies over the past two centuries.”
He paused theatrically, sipped some water, and continued: “The second possibility involves the structural quantum relativity theory that Benvenides proposed in 2157. Difficult to explain without the math, you understand, yet think of it like this: Perhaps time does not pass in the way we subjectively experience, but expands in a fashion analogous to space. We know there was an inflationary period in the early universe wherein space actually expanded faster than the speed of light. Benvenides suggested that not only does time expand, but also that gravity causes it to expand at different rates in different places. We could therefore be caught in a region of quantum chronological differentiation.
“Now, as to the third poss—“
Malvoux interrupted the physicist, who had become so enmeshed in his own rhetorical brilliance that he did not realize that absolutely no one had any idea what he had just said. “Could you explain what a quantum chronology difference is? I’m sure everyone else knows, but I’m confused.”
“What? Of course. It means essentially that local time here at Gliese may be passing either faster or slower than local time on Earth, regardless of the time dilation effect of our voyage. Strange things happen to the numbers when we postulate passing differential borders. It’s possible that we arrived here after we had already departed.”
Mbolo sounded skeptical. “Even if that’s true, professor, how does it explain the satellite? Maybe my face already left before my butt got here, I can get that. What I don’t understand is how that makes it possible for me to have left a satellite behind that I never had with me in the first place.”
Rothmann dismissed this objection with a wave of his hand. “That particular comsat could have been left behind by another expedition that—by local Earth time—left for Gliese twenty years after we did, but crossed the differential at a more acute angle and ended up here ahead of us.”
“So does it get home before it left?” jabbed Chien. “Or before we left? Which would be pretty difficult since we don’t remember it.”
“Maybe it happened during the last six months and nobody bothered to leave us a note,” someone said sarcastically.
Rothmann took a deep breath, visibly controlling his temper now, and said, “Clearly all the paradoxes have not been worked out. That’s why they’re still paradoxes. However, it’s also possible that we’ve been caught in a closed time-like loop, and have—quite frankly—either been shuttled into or have even created a parallel reality.”
“Which means what, in terms of what’s going to be waiting on us when we finally get home?” demanded Slattery.
“Who knows? We could find a world indistinguishable from our own, a world in which the Southern Hemispheric Union never existed, or even an Earth where it’s forty years later that we thought it would be.”
“All of your scenarios, Professor Rothmann, appear to have in common the idea that we have unknowingly slipped into some other spacetime,” observed Chien. “Shouldn’t Occam’s Razor demand at least one explanation that doesn’t involve the wholesale changing of natural laws? Such changes, I might add, that have yet to be reported from any other interstellar venture?”
Listening to the discussion without any intent to contribute, Leath had to admit that he agreed with her. He wondered how Rothmann would handle the question.
The physicist smiled sadly and spread his hands. He said, “That’s the crux of the problem, Ogda, isn’t it? A satellite produced two years before we arrive—not to mention the time involved in transporting it here—appears to demand some sort of temporal dislocation, doesn’t it? If not, the only potential explanation I can imagine is my fourth possibility. What we think we’re seeing is not what we really are seeing. Some party or force capable of casting a consistent cognitive illusion is distorting our perceptions of reality. Personally, I don’t favor that alternative, because by definition we have no way to verify or disprove it.”
“So unless the aliens with the thought projectors announce themselves,” said Detroit, “we can never be sure they’re here.”
Rothmann nodded sagely, having recovered his audience. Then he used the line that Leath had been waiting for, the line designed to cement his position as de facto leader, if not de jure commander: “Now, as to how we proceed, I’ve amended the mission profile to allow those concerned with the regular planetary studies to undertake their tasks with only minor modifications, while our crew assists me in some observations to clarify our physical-temporal situation. You’ll all be receiving it in a few moments.”
This was the instant for a resolute captain to speak up, to retain control of the situation. Leath could feel Detroit’s eyes on him from the adjoining station, waiting for some pronouncement.
But the captain said nothing.
There had been an additional problem with the comsat besides its putative date of manufacture. The core memory downloaded into the Zheng He’s mainframe had been encrypted with a quantum-entangled key, and was thus unreadable. Leath briefly considered having the satellite brought onboard and disassembled to search for more clues.
Yet doing so would have required several hours to rematch orbits, while Malvoux had already begun champing at the bit to deploy his climate surveillance package. Both the climatologist and Slattery, the exo-biologist, would fight any delays, which would cement Rothmann more firmly as the final arbiter of mission-critical decisions. While Leath was not yet prepared to challenge the physicist’s informal power, he did not have any intention of helping solidify it.
A second reason for leaving the satellite alone was the fact that the captain could not dismiss completely Rothmann’s fourth scenario. If something had altered their perceptions, then the last act they should be committing was to take onboard a potentially alien artifact of unknowable power and intentions.
So again, he said and did nothing.
The first interstellar captains had been men and women noticeably larger than life. The panache of Abner Jolly, the intensity of Susan Heynan, and even the bland unflappability of Yekial Masood had been writ large in the netcasts as the hallmarks of heroic adventurers. Gliese 581 was a second-line mission, an almost routine scientific odyssey to a fairly insignificant red dwarf star that achieved media prominence more due to Rothman’s presence than to the personality of its mission commander. Indeed, Leath speculated that Masood might simply have exercised his option—even during the last six months—to bypass the Zheng He in favor of more important commands he was sure to be offered.
Not so Leath. The adjectives most often applied to his fitness reports were “steady, “reliable,” and “conscientious.” Heynan characterized him as “a somewhat better than average officer when things are progressing normally, and the man you’d most like to have working with you in a crisis.” Both of his ex-wives, Leath suspected, would have framed the observation differently, though they would have agreed with the sentiment.
He considered himself a man of broad intelligence and a penetrating ability to focus, but admitted his lack of a long-term ability to sustain his intensity for any single discipline. Leath tended to make sporadic forays into obscure sub-sections of highly complicated areas, even to the point of achieving a narrow mastery that could masquerade as professional attainment. He had managed, over the decades of his extended life, to publish papers in refereed journals on subjects as disparate as early Christian theology, the filament structure of irregular spiral galaxies, and political indoctrination in the Egyptian Army prior to the 2017 coup.
So it would not be precisely correct to say that, during the three weeks following the satellite’s discovery, Captain Leath did nothing. He simply did nothing about Rothmann’s overt attempt to seize control of the mission. At the same time, he became punctilious about the minutiae of his responsibilities, checking the performance of his officers and technicians, the reliability of their various systems, and—strictly per mission profile—conducting a meticulous inventory of ship equipment and stores. Leath was, Lieutenant Detroit told Boone during one long watch, “a man who’s lost control, and who’s attempting not to notice by reminding us of his remaining authority over petty details.”
Boone, who unlike Detroit had served with Leath before, emulated his captain and said nothing.
Meanwhile, within the solitude of his cabin, Leath set out on one of his patented, intensive periods of study, taking as his subject the life and writings of Hoobart Rothmann. The physicist had already penned two self-serving autobiographies, five “popular” scientific books, and three full-length technical monographs, as well as being credited as principal or co-author on a staggering 276 published papers. Leath was unsurprised to discover all of them on the mainframe, including pre-prints of four that had yet to be published before the Gliese mission had launched.
In Aiming for the Stars: A Physicist Challenges Humanity’s Limitations, Rothmann had written,
The Takai Transforms appeared constantly in Rothmann’s work. Leath knew that they reputedly hinted at the possibility of utilizing negative energy to create a localized, faster-than-light expansion of spacetime first suggested by Miguel Alcubierre in the late 1900s. Within a decade his concept had been dismissed, primarily on the basis of its apparent violation of various quantum inequalities and the limitations that quantum coherence seemed to place on the use of negative energy. In 2138, Berenda Takai—then a virtually unknown postdoc—had published a series of incomplete equations suggesting that these were not insuperable difficulties after all. The only problem: the Takai Transforms not only required certain values that could only be derived from quantum gravity, but yielded values for time that were essentially meaningless.
Rothmann, however, renormalized the time values, and in 2163 managed to generate the equations necessary to produce not a warp drive, but a workable negative mass propulsion system capable of reaching .995 C. The resulting Slingshot Mission to Alpha Centauri proved that mankind now had a practical technology for probing—at least—the nearest stars, and incidentally left the physicist filthy rich. Yet as Rothmann admitted in his autobiographies, it was the breakthrough moment and the adulation of the masses he craved. That the interstellar captains had soon eclipsed him as media darlings was a bone stuck deep within his throat. Which explained, thought Leath, Rothmann’s last fifteen years bashing his head against the walls surrounding the Takai Transforms, searching for the moment of discovery that would make him immortal.
Thus, on the twenty-third day after the discovery of the comsat, as Leath blacked out his cabin for his sleep period, he was still pondering the most niggling question of all: Why was the man out here, twenty-one light years from home?
Incident at Gliese 581c
An original Science Fiction story by
Steve Newton
(c) 2008; all rights reserved
They had finished cataloging two large and thirty-nine small moons circling 581D, completing the flyby, and were turning their attention to the inner planets when Raaj Penstock asked Centavi Mbolo to drift over to his workstation.
“What is it?”
“Look for yourself,” he insisted. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy.”
The tall woman with the shaved head and the nu-clan tattoos leaned down to the eyepiece. The scope targeted Gliese 581C, 2.95 Earth masses, once briefly famous as the first exo-planet discovered capable of harboring liquid water. After thirty seconds, she lifted her face, turned to the keypad and typed in a series of inquiries. She studied the output for nearly two minutes, and said, “That’s not possible. Is it?”
Penstock was a squat man whose normal, affected British accent disappeared under stress. Two months before the Zheng He launched from Earth, they had enjoyed a brief, passionate fling that neither could remember.
“Forget whether or not it’s possible. What does it look like to you?”
Mbolo fingered a design on her cheek, idly tracing its curl down toward her chin; there was another tattoo swirling around her neck, but she didn’t know how it had gotten there, and never touched it. “It looks like a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, is what it looks like.”
“That’s what I thought, too. We’d better tell the Captain.”
“The hell with the Captain. We’d better tell Rothmann.”
Hoobart Rothmann was the enfant terrible theoretical physicist who developed the Rothmann Negative Mass Drive, and whose fortune had bankrolled the mission to Gliese 581. Nobody liked Rothmann The standing joke among the crew was that they were the only people who had ever spent twenty years in proximity to Hoobart Rothmann without trying to kill him—although doing so required them to be in Coldsleep.
Raaj took the lead in attempting to explain what they had discovered, “Sir, this thing checks out as a Class Four communications satellite. It appears to be the same configuration that we’re carrying for deployment into the same orbit.”
Rothmann was a florid, pudgy man, whose features simultaneously seemed regular and scrambled. He sneered a lot.
“Which just happens to be orbiting 581C when we arrive? Far more likely, Penstock, that some cretin on the observation staff has decided a little practical joke is in order. When I find out who to blame for this outrage, they will be having a very long year.”
“Then verify it yourself, Doctor Rothmann, if you don’t believe us,” Mbolo snapped. “We were extending a professional courtesy by informing you of what we found. You can act on it or not, but neither Raaj nor I are going to stay here and take your abuse.”
“Professional courtesy exists between intellectual and professional equals. Subordinates such as yourself are merely expected to do your jobs competently without getting in the way. So get out of my quarters and try to make yourself useful somewhere else.”
They took the sighting to Captain Kirk Leath, a lean man who wore a perpetually amused look. Leath asked a series of polite but penetrating questions, and then sent Penstock and Mbolo back to their stations for a full workup. Ogda Chien, the mission’s cosmologist and back-up astrographer, appeared soon after, and became drawn into the mystery. Within hours, all seventeen people aboard knew about the sighting, and speculation ran rampant.
Rothmann remained isolated in his quarters.
Nineteen hours later, Captain Leath used a proprietary code to override the privacy lock-out on the physicist’s door. Without preamble, he said, “Professor Rothmann, this is neither a prank nor an equipment malfunction. As Penstock and Mbolo told you yesterday, there appears to be a communications satellite orbiting the planet.”
Rothmann stared at him as if the potato on his plate had just engaged him in conversation. He said, “All right, Captain. Let’s assume for the moment that your underlings have found something in orbit. Of four possibilities, one is still that this so-called satellite is either a ghost in your machine or a piece of juvenile humor. Perhaps your astrography staff has misidentified a tiny moon. Only after those are completely ruled out do we have an artificial satellite. Then we determine its origin, which is more likely to be alien than a human satellite that somehow wandered twenty light years out of the solar system.”
“Then, sir, how would you suggest we proceed?”
“That is the first intelligent question anyone has yet asked. I gave the matter the ten minutes of thought that it deserved yesterday,” Rothmann said, turning away and touching his keypad. “I’ve sent you a detailed protocol, both in terms of determining whether this is in fact a hoax, and in narrowing down the origin of the item. For a start, everyone should stop referring to this object as a communications satellite—such a premature conclusion will prejudice your ability to see what’s actually there.”
Leath retreated. Dealing with Rothmann always made him feel disoriented, perhaps even daunted. He knew that Rothmann did not like him, and had originally vetoed his selection as mission commander. His record, however, had been good enough that Deep Space Exploratory Command insisted on Leath’s assignment as back-up commander during train-up. Sometime during the six months prior to launch, he had replaced Captain Masood. Nobody on board—Leath included—knew why.
Coldsleep had merged late 21st Century understandings of cryogenics with neuropsychological research on comatose and permanently vegetative trauma victims. Even before the Slingshot mission to Alpha Centauri, Coldsleep had delivered colonists to Mars, Vesta, Ganymede, and Titan economically and safely (a fatality rate of less than .001%). Extensive testing had discovered only one significant side effect: the necessary preliminary injections wiped out the subject’s last five or six months’ memory prior to chill-down. Thus Penstock and Mbolo did not recall their affair, technician Jahn Boone didn’t know the sex of his first grandchild, and even Rothmann would have lacked any memory of the critical responses to his last paper on solving the Takai Transforms.
Despite his uncertainties about the reasons why he had awoken light years away from Earth rather than in the control chambers a year after the Zheng He’s launch, Leath took his obligations as mission commander seriously—more seriously in fact than Rothmann would have preferred. Leath had considered, for instance, that while the professional crew aboard was first-rate, none of the other scientists belonged to the top tiers of their profession. Ogda Chien was a second-string cosmologist, Phineen Slattery an exo-biologist with only minor publication credentials, and Andrej Malvoux a planetary climatologist past the prime he may never have had. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Hoobart Rothmann desired no intellectual competition during his year in the Gliese system.
Leath did not, therefore, ignore Rothmann’s protocols, because he doubted that anyone else aboard could have generated anything better. Instead, he initiated them without crediting their source. Everyone might have suspicions, yet suspicions were not certainty, and the resultant ambiguity allowed the work to continue without too much rancor. By the time the ship cleared 581D’s surprisingly strong magnetic field, Mbolo picked up a faint transponder code, which almost matched that of their own satellites waiting in the hold for deployment.
Almost, but not quite.
“The signal compression rate’s just a hair different,” Boone said. “The identification code has sixteen digits, not fourteen.”
Per the protocols, a rigorous search for other signal sources ensued before Leath would authorize transmitting a dump query to the satellite. Likewise, the Zheng He altered course to drop below the ecliptic and pass around the tidally locked, sun-facing hemisphere of Gliese 581B before swinging around into proximity with the anomaly. The captain approved of this cautious approach. If there was anybody out there, Leath wanted to know as soon as possible.
Apparently there wasn’t.
Unfortunately, the dump query also failed to stimulate the comsat into downloading its core memory. Leath ordered a shuttle dispatched for Boone to dump the satellite’s memory manually. Everyone except Rothmann found themselves glued to a screen as the technician approached his prey.
“This is pretty damn strange, Captain,” Boone reported. “According to the access panel markings this is a Siemens Class Four, Mark Seven, Communications Satellite.”
“Why is that so strange?”
There was a short pause before Boone replied.
“Well, sir, it’s like this. The ones we’ve got are Siemens Mark Fives, and when we left home that was the latest model available.”
Leath tried to ignore the spreading chill in the pit of his stomach.
“Boone, do you think you’ll be able to conduct a manual dump?”
“Let’s see. Yeah, I think so. The couplings are the same. Get in there you little bugger. The keypad’s also the same. C’mon baby, listen to papa.”
A long minute passed. From the workstation to Leath’s right, Lieutenant Dany Detroit said, “Good work, Boone, I’m receiving data.”
Leath allowed himself a brief smile, felt the cold within him lessen just bit, until the technician said, “Uh, Captain, there’s a product run identifier on the inside of this panel. It says that the satellite was produced in 2217.”
Glaciers surged forward inside him. The Zheng He had departed Earth on 2194; according to the vessel’s mainframe (which told time based on calculating the observed time onboard at .995 C during the trip as registered by a cesium-decay clock and comparing that to predicted time-dilation caused by their velocity), on Earth right now it was 2215.
This satellite wouldn’t be built for two more years.
* * *
“There are really only four viable solutions to this problem.”
Rothmann loved an audience more than anything, which explained why people outside the scientific community thought he was urbane, charming, and witty. They’d only known him through netcasts, and had been spared his pre-show green room rages when the sauvignon blanc wasn’t properly chilled. With everyone onboard tuning in, he reverted to his media persona.
“Possibility number one is that we encountered some kind of space-time fold during our voyage here. Those of you who have been following my work on the Takai Transforms will recall that several theorists have proposed this solution as a possible answer. Entering such a fold would transport you not only in space, but in time as well. That would only leave the question of whether or not we have actually exited the fold.”
“Something as large as the Gliese system could be caught in one of these folds?” Penstock asked.
Rothmann was magnanimous; he doted on questions that gave him to opportunity to clarify theoretical physics for the masses. “Actually, Takai speculated that if such folds existed they could be large enough to contain entire galaxies, which might explain any number of observational anomalies over the past two centuries.”
He paused theatrically, sipped some water, and continued: “The second possibility involves the structural quantum relativity theory that Benvenides proposed in 2157. Difficult to explain without the math, you understand, yet think of it like this: Perhaps time does not pass in the way we subjectively experience, but expands in a fashion analogous to space. We know there was an inflationary period in the early universe wherein space actually expanded faster than the speed of light. Benvenides suggested that not only does time expand, but also that gravity causes it to expand at different rates in different places. We could therefore be caught in a region of quantum chronological differentiation.
“Now, as to the third poss—“
Malvoux interrupted the physicist, who had become so enmeshed in his own rhetorical brilliance that he did not realize that absolutely no one had any idea what he had just said. “Could you explain what a quantum chronology difference is? I’m sure everyone else knows, but I’m confused.”
“What? Of course. It means essentially that local time here at Gliese may be passing either faster or slower than local time on Earth, regardless of the time dilation effect of our voyage. Strange things happen to the numbers when we postulate passing differential borders. It’s possible that we arrived here after we had already departed.”
Mbolo sounded skeptical. “Even if that’s true, professor, how does it explain the satellite? Maybe my face already left before my butt got here, I can get that. What I don’t understand is how that makes it possible for me to have left a satellite behind that I never had with me in the first place.”
Rothmann dismissed this objection with a wave of his hand. “That particular comsat could have been left behind by another expedition that—by local Earth time—left for Gliese twenty years after we did, but crossed the differential at a more acute angle and ended up here ahead of us.”
“So does it get home before it left?” jabbed Chien. “Or before we left? Which would be pretty difficult since we don’t remember it.”
“Maybe it happened during the last six months and nobody bothered to leave us a note,” someone said sarcastically.
Rothmann took a deep breath, visibly controlling his temper now, and said, “Clearly all the paradoxes have not been worked out. That’s why they’re still paradoxes. However, it’s also possible that we’ve been caught in a closed time-like loop, and have—quite frankly—either been shuttled into or have even created a parallel reality.”
“Which means what, in terms of what’s going to be waiting on us when we finally get home?” demanded Slattery.
“Who knows? We could find a world indistinguishable from our own, a world in which the Southern Hemispheric Union never existed, or even an Earth where it’s forty years later that we thought it would be.”
“All of your scenarios, Professor Rothmann, appear to have in common the idea that we have unknowingly slipped into some other spacetime,” observed Chien. “Shouldn’t Occam’s Razor demand at least one explanation that doesn’t involve the wholesale changing of natural laws? Such changes, I might add, that have yet to be reported from any other interstellar venture?”
Listening to the discussion without any intent to contribute, Leath had to admit that he agreed with her. He wondered how Rothmann would handle the question.
The physicist smiled sadly and spread his hands. He said, “That’s the crux of the problem, Ogda, isn’t it? A satellite produced two years before we arrive—not to mention the time involved in transporting it here—appears to demand some sort of temporal dislocation, doesn’t it? If not, the only potential explanation I can imagine is my fourth possibility. What we think we’re seeing is not what we really are seeing. Some party or force capable of casting a consistent cognitive illusion is distorting our perceptions of reality. Personally, I don’t favor that alternative, because by definition we have no way to verify or disprove it.”
“So unless the aliens with the thought projectors announce themselves,” said Detroit, “we can never be sure they’re here.”
Rothmann nodded sagely, having recovered his audience. Then he used the line that Leath had been waiting for, the line designed to cement his position as de facto leader, if not de jure commander: “Now, as to how we proceed, I’ve amended the mission profile to allow those concerned with the regular planetary studies to undertake their tasks with only minor modifications, while our crew assists me in some observations to clarify our physical-temporal situation. You’ll all be receiving it in a few moments.”
This was the instant for a resolute captain to speak up, to retain control of the situation. Leath could feel Detroit’s eyes on him from the adjoining station, waiting for some pronouncement.
But the captain said nothing.
* * *
There had been an additional problem with the comsat besides its putative date of manufacture. The core memory downloaded into the Zheng He’s mainframe had been encrypted with a quantum-entangled key, and was thus unreadable. Leath briefly considered having the satellite brought onboard and disassembled to search for more clues.
Yet doing so would have required several hours to rematch orbits, while Malvoux had already begun champing at the bit to deploy his climate surveillance package. Both the climatologist and Slattery, the exo-biologist, would fight any delays, which would cement Rothmann more firmly as the final arbiter of mission-critical decisions. While Leath was not yet prepared to challenge the physicist’s informal power, he did not have any intention of helping solidify it.
A second reason for leaving the satellite alone was the fact that the captain could not dismiss completely Rothmann’s fourth scenario. If something had altered their perceptions, then the last act they should be committing was to take onboard a potentially alien artifact of unknowable power and intentions.
So again, he said and did nothing.
The first interstellar captains had been men and women noticeably larger than life. The panache of Abner Jolly, the intensity of Susan Heynan, and even the bland unflappability of Yekial Masood had been writ large in the netcasts as the hallmarks of heroic adventurers. Gliese 581 was a second-line mission, an almost routine scientific odyssey to a fairly insignificant red dwarf star that achieved media prominence more due to Rothman’s presence than to the personality of its mission commander. Indeed, Leath speculated that Masood might simply have exercised his option—even during the last six months—to bypass the Zheng He in favor of more important commands he was sure to be offered.
Not so Leath. The adjectives most often applied to his fitness reports were “steady, “reliable,” and “conscientious.” Heynan characterized him as “a somewhat better than average officer when things are progressing normally, and the man you’d most like to have working with you in a crisis.” Both of his ex-wives, Leath suspected, would have framed the observation differently, though they would have agreed with the sentiment.
He considered himself a man of broad intelligence and a penetrating ability to focus, but admitted his lack of a long-term ability to sustain his intensity for any single discipline. Leath tended to make sporadic forays into obscure sub-sections of highly complicated areas, even to the point of achieving a narrow mastery that could masquerade as professional attainment. He had managed, over the decades of his extended life, to publish papers in refereed journals on subjects as disparate as early Christian theology, the filament structure of irregular spiral galaxies, and political indoctrination in the Egyptian Army prior to the 2017 coup.
So it would not be precisely correct to say that, during the three weeks following the satellite’s discovery, Captain Leath did nothing. He simply did nothing about Rothmann’s overt attempt to seize control of the mission. At the same time, he became punctilious about the minutiae of his responsibilities, checking the performance of his officers and technicians, the reliability of their various systems, and—strictly per mission profile—conducting a meticulous inventory of ship equipment and stores. Leath was, Lieutenant Detroit told Boone during one long watch, “a man who’s lost control, and who’s attempting not to notice by reminding us of his remaining authority over petty details.”
Boone, who unlike Detroit had served with Leath before, emulated his captain and said nothing.
Meanwhile, within the solitude of his cabin, Leath set out on one of his patented, intensive periods of study, taking as his subject the life and writings of Hoobart Rothmann. The physicist had already penned two self-serving autobiographies, five “popular” scientific books, and three full-length technical monographs, as well as being credited as principal or co-author on a staggering 276 published papers. Leath was unsurprised to discover all of them on the mainframe, including pre-prints of four that had yet to be published before the Gliese mission had launched.
In Aiming for the Stars: A Physicist Challenges Humanity’s Limitations, Rothmann had written,
The scientist does not feel daunted by the prospect of spending decades in Coldsleep on interstellar journeys. He doesn’t dwell on lost family and friends so much as he tingles in the anticipation of the opportunities future technology might offer at the end of his voyage. Consider Einstein at the peak of his intellectual prowess given the opportunity to leapfrog forward to the mid-21st Century and use the first reliable quantum computers. Could that formidable mind have thus resolved the question of quantum gravity? Or Takai, whose elegant transforms hold out the possibility of a true warp drive, and who tragically died of cancer at forty-seven, still waiting for the development of sufficient processing power to prove out her equations….
The Takai Transforms appeared constantly in Rothmann’s work. Leath knew that they reputedly hinted at the possibility of utilizing negative energy to create a localized, faster-than-light expansion of spacetime first suggested by Miguel Alcubierre in the late 1900s. Within a decade his concept had been dismissed, primarily on the basis of its apparent violation of various quantum inequalities and the limitations that quantum coherence seemed to place on the use of negative energy. In 2138, Berenda Takai—then a virtually unknown postdoc—had published a series of incomplete equations suggesting that these were not insuperable difficulties after all. The only problem: the Takai Transforms not only required certain values that could only be derived from quantum gravity, but yielded values for time that were essentially meaningless.
Rothmann, however, renormalized the time values, and in 2163 managed to generate the equations necessary to produce not a warp drive, but a workable negative mass propulsion system capable of reaching .995 C. The resulting Slingshot Mission to Alpha Centauri proved that mankind now had a practical technology for probing—at least—the nearest stars, and incidentally left the physicist filthy rich. Yet as Rothmann admitted in his autobiographies, it was the breakthrough moment and the adulation of the masses he craved. That the interstellar captains had soon eclipsed him as media darlings was a bone stuck deep within his throat. Which explained, thought Leath, Rothmann’s last fifteen years bashing his head against the walls surrounding the Takai Transforms, searching for the moment of discovery that would make him immortal.
Thus, on the twenty-third day after the discovery of the comsat, as Leath blacked out his cabin for his sleep period, he was still pondering the most niggling question of all: Why was the man out here, twenty-one light years from home?
To be continued....
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