The Lure Part 40

From the New York Times, 12 January: We Are Not Alone SIGNAL FROM ALIENS.

Scientists huddled behind closed doors in a secret location in the former Czechoslovakia have received a message from aliens. This sensational announcement was made to a packed plenary session of the United Nations by David Garcia Alvarez, the Secretary General, who opened the proceedings with the historic words 'We are not alone.

A BRITISH TRIUMPH.

A brief burst of high-energy atomic particles, detected on 3 January in an underground, British-run laboratory in a secret cave in a remote mountain range known as the Tatras in Eastern Europe, was found to contain an intelligent pattern. Decipherment of the pattern revealed that complex information, centuries ahead of present-day science, was being transmitted to Earth. Until this momentous event the laboratory had operated for twelve years without detecting a single exotic particle.

President Bull interrupted a vacation weekend in Camp David to telephone his congratulations to the scientists and invite them to the States. He has called for a full discussion between politicians, academics, scientists and the general public on the implications of this event. The signal, recorded on an ordinary CD, is at present with the National Security Agency and is being deciphered with the aid of specialists in many disciplines. A similar effort is underway at the British GCHQ and, reportedly, in Moscow. Tightlipped officials at NSA Headquarters revealed nothing about whether progress has been made in decipherment, and if so, what the message contains.

'We are delighted that this fantastic discovery was made by a British facility, said Prime Minister Alan Edgeworth in the House of Commons this morning. Lord Sangster, Minister for Science, said, 'Our warmest congratulations go to the team. Of course this finding, while made with a British facility, is made on behalf of all mankind, in keeping with agreed protocols and in the traditional spirit of scientific openness.

A sour note was struck by Congressman Dan Shulman. 'This is the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And I think the American people are ent.i.tled to know why, with the billions of dollars which this country pours into its scientific community, we were second fiddle to a shoestring outfit in Eastern Europe, said the 50-year-old Representative from Ohio.

But according to Professor Chris McCracken of Berkeley, 'We cant rule out that signals have already been sent to us and not recognised as intelligent. We laced a cubic kilometre of Arctic ice with light detectors five years ago and the experiment has been operating continuously since then. Many particles of uncertain origin have pa.s.sed through the big ice cube. Some of them could have been from the aliens. McCracken admitted, however, that this was just speculation at the moment. 'We will be re-a.n.a.lysing our data...

NASA VINDICATED.

'The finding is an amazing event, but it had to happen sooner or later, said NASA Director Dan Tellman. 'Put water and organics together and you have life. Planetary systems are extremely common and most of these, in the so-called habitable zone around stars, will have water. In these circ.u.mstances we expect life to evolve, and intelligence to develop, throughout the Galaxy. This is why NASA has directed so much energy into the exploration of Europa and Mars. NASAs Origins program was designed specifically...

RELIGIOUS LEADERS WELCOME FINDING.

Religious leaders everywhere have welcomed the discovery. Speaking from his home in North Carolina, veteran evangelist Seth Logie said, 'This ill.u.s.trates the bountiful nature of G.o.d. How can we imagine that He would create a vast Universe and yet limit life to one small planet? Pope John declared ...

SECRET LOCATION.

A baffling feature of the signal is that it seems to have come from an empty region of sky. 'This neednt surprise us too much, said a spokesman from the Baltimore s.p.a.ce Telescope Inst.i.tute. 'Many stars are faint and distant. The Hubble telescope is already staring at one of the two possible celestial patches of sky from which the signal may have originated.

The location of these patches will remain a closely guarded secret until a carefully formulated reply has been composed, agreed by and sent on behalf of the United Nations. To be understood, the message will have to be in the form of easily deciphered pictograms until a common language has been built up. Depending on the location of the signallers, it could take years or even centuries for the message to reach them. Already, however, a team of ...

MYSTERY.

The finding is touched with a drama worthy of the pages of fiction. The castle where the data were a.n.a.lysed, near the village of Smolenie in southern Slovakia, was destroyed by fire shortly after the a.n.a.lysis was complete. Two of the scientists, Dr Thomas Petrie, a twenty-nine-year-old British mathematician based in Dublin, and Dr Freya Strmer, an astronomer from Troms, Norway, had just left Slovakia to bring the news straight to the United Nations building. The three scientists remaining in the castle were rescued by the fire brigade. The Russians, Drs Vashislav Shtyrkov and Svetlana Popov, are currently in Moscow briefing the Russian authorities. Dr Charles Gibson, the team leader, is in London ...

Postscript.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

The question 'Are we alone? is, at present, unanswered. Serious people deploy apparently sound arguments to reach opposite conclusions: these arguments, for and against, are given by the various fictional characters who populate The Lure.

The Galaxy is ancient. If civilisations were common there would have been adequate time for them (or even one of them) to have spread everywhere, including here on Earth. But they are not here, nor do we see any sign of them elsewhere. Therefore we are alone. This is consistent with the stunningly improbable series of chemical flukes needed to create life from dead matter.

The Galaxy is vast, and teeming with stars. There may be a hundred planets for every human being, many of which will be Earth-like. Given the speed with which life took hold on Earth, its development in the right environments must be commonplace. Given the selective advantages of a central nervous system all the way to a brain, intelligence must be found everywhere in the Universe where conditions are right. Therefore the Universe is teeming with intelligent life.

Both arguments are persuasive, but they cant both be right!

At present, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) beyond our solar system consists of a dozen or so independent programs spread around the globe. Strangely, nearly all of this funding is philanthropic, in spite of the fact that the question touches on some of the most profound issues of human existence (here). There are two types of search program, namely sky surveys and targeted searches. In a project funded by the Planetary Society and the SETI Inst.i.tute, whole-sky data from the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico are routinely a.n.a.lysed by about four million computer owners worldwide, running a 'screensaver, background program. Another major sky survey, Project Argus, consists of about a thousand amateurs operating a number of small, 'backyard radio-telescopes. Project Phoenix, on the other hand, uses the worlds largest radio telescopes. It is a targeted radio search, concentrating on about 1,000 nearby stars, that is within 155 light years of us. The project is well advanced, but so far it has met only the Great Silence.

Plans exist for a targeted search of 100,000 stars over an eight-year period. This may be a prelude to a search for signals from a million stars using the extremely powerful SKA, a square kilometre array of 500 to 1,000 radio telescopes yet to be built. Ultimately it is hoped to search a billion stars in the expectation of finding the strong, transient signal which will tell us that there are other sentient beings in the galactic wilderness.

These searches all take place at radio wavelengths. In recent years, however, a few searches involving small (again some almost backyard) optical telescopes have taken place for laser pulses coming from the nearest 1,000 or so stars. As we go to more and more energetic particles, more information can be packed into a signal of given duration. This leaves one with the nagging feeling that, maybe, civilisations a thousand or a million years older than ours may not communicate with such primitive devices as smoke signals, radio telescopes or lasers. It is true that the energy needed to send a signal increases pro rata with the energy of the carrier particle. However, the energy available at the start of the twentieth century was dwarfed by that available at its end (compare the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk with a Boeing 747), and it is reasonable to suppose that the huge energies required for particle beaming will be available to alien civilisations.

That there may be a subtle interplay between the Universe and the life it contains is hinted at by Freya (p.171). The fine tuning which she describes is real and baffling. It may imply that the universe we inhabit is only one of many, the whole 'multiverse being an infinite ensemble of universes with different properties, only a tiny proportion of which have the properties to harbour life. Or it may be that our universe has arisen (if it 'arose at all) as part of a process which allows new universes to grow within it, each with its own properties, some of them suitable for life. Or (unfashionable thought!) the Universe may have been created for the purpose of harbouring life. It has even been suggested that life itself structured the Universe to favour its own continuation. Whatever the merits of such ideas, we may well agree with Shakespeares Hamlet that There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The bizarre 'wheels of light at sea are real, and the descriptions quoted are genuine. They have no known explanation. Petries apparently mad theorising about astral phenomena and altered states of consciousness in the Book of Revelation is in fact a respected opinion amongst Biblical scholars.

Bill Napier.

Read on for an excerpt from another.

fascinating book by Bill Napier.

Revelation.

Coming soon from.

St. Martins Paperbacks.

Prologue.

At the mention of memoirs, the Minister threatens me with everything from Section Two to the Chinese water torture. Naturally, since all I want is a quiet life, I back down. To his credit, he tries not to smirk.

'You cant stop me writing a novel, though.

The Minister turns puce but then hes known to be heavy on the port.

So here it is. Of course its only a story, and if pressed I will deny that it ever happened. And deny it I have done, consistently, in all my conversations with those people with polite voices and calculating eyes.

To me, as a polar ice man, theres nothing odd about a tale of fire which starts in an Arctic blizzard. The planet is an interconnected whole; I measure the burning of rainforests in the thinning of the pack ice I walk on, and of fossil fuels in the desperate hunger of the ten-footers which raid our camps. The Arctic, in turn, is biding her time, quietly stoking up her revenge ... but I digress.

The key to unlocking the secret of the diaries was Archie. My old friend Archie was the fatal miscalculation of the puppet masters. They had correctly a.s.sumed that I wouldnt understand the material I was handling, that I lacked the arcane knowledge which was the key to the secret. But if this particular puppet cut its strings, if I didnt do what my manipulators expected me to do, well, I give the credit to Archie.

We went back to the Creation, Archie and I. As boys wed wandered around Glasgows Castlemilk district in the days when it was run by real hard men, not the sham jessies you see now. Young buccaneers in search of trouble, which we often found. And if that seems an unlikely start to a couple of academic careers, I could tell you some juicy tales about quite a few distinguished Glaswegians. In fact our current Scottish Prime Minister ... but there I go, wandering again.

Then there were the ladies, and then I went to Aberdeen and we drifted our separate ways until we met by chance years later at a Royal Society dinner in London. Archie the buccaneer was now a respected nuclear physicist, renowned for his work on superstring theory. I was into Arctic climate, looking for signs of trouble ahead. New Age monks, we had disdained commerce, despised the worldly, and devoted our lives instead to the search for greater truths.

As to how this unworldly pair reacted when wealth beyond calculation came within our reach, well thats part of the story.

The rest of it has to do with blowing the planet to h.e.l.l.

1.

The Shadow on the Lake.

Thursday, 29 July 1942.

Out-of-towners. Men with an intense, almost unnatural aura about them. Come from G.o.d knows where to the back of beyond. In his imagination, the station master sees gangsters, Mafia bosses come for a secret confab.

It is, after all, a quiet branch line, and he has to occupy his mind with something.

He has no way of knowing that the three men alighting from the Pullman are infinitely more dangerous than anything his imagination can devise.

First out is John Baudino, the Popes bodyguard. His gorilla frame almost fills the carriage door. He is carrying a dark green shopping bag. Baudino surveys the platform suspiciously before stepping down. Two others follow, one a tall, thin man with intense blue eyes. He is wearing a broad-brimmed pork-pie hat, and is smoking a cigarette. The third man is thin and studious, with a pale, serious face and round spectacles.

The man waiting impatiently on the empty railway platform expected only Oppenheimer; the other two are a surprise.

'h.e.l.lo, Arthur, says the man with the blue eyes, shaking hands. He looks bleary, as if he hasnt slept.

'You could have flown, Oppie. A thousand miles is one h.e.l.luva train ride.

Oppenheimer drops his cigarette on the platform and exhales the last of the smoke. 'You know how it is with the General. He thinks were too valuable to risk in the air.

Arthur Compton leads the way to the exit gate.

The station master gives them a suspicious nod. 'Yall here for the fishing? he asks, attempting a friendly tone. It is out of season for the angling. His eyes stray to their unfishing-like clothes and luggage.

'No. Were German spies, growls Baudino, thrusting the train tickets at him. The station master snaps their tickets and cackles nervously.

In Comptons estate wagon, Baudino pulls a notebook and a Colt 38 out of the shopping bag at his feet. He rests the weapon on his knees. He says, 'Do your talking somewhere quiet, Mister Compton. And not in the cottage.

'Come on, John, its a hideaway. n.o.body even knows Im here.

'We found you, Baudino says over his shoulder. He is already checking car registration numbers against a list.

Compton thinks about that. 'Yeah. He takes the car along a narrow, quiet suburban road. After about three miles the houses peter out and the road is lined with conifer forest. Now and then a lake can be glimpsed to the right, through the trees. After ten minutes Compton goes down through the gears and then turns off along a rough track. About a mile on he arrives at a clearing, and pulls up at a log cabin. A line of washing is strung out on the verandah. They step out and stretch their limbs. The air is cool and clear. Baudino slips the gun into his trouser belt.

Compton says, 'You know what Im enjoying about this place? The water. Its everywhere. It even descends from the sky. After the mesa, its glorious. You guys want coffee?

Oppenheimer shakes his head. 'Later. First, lets talk. He leans into the wagon and pulls out a briefcase.

Compton points and they set off through a track in the woods. After half a mile they come to a lake whose far edge is somewhere over the horizon. They set off along the pebbled beach. Baudino takes up the rear, about thirty yards behind the other three, to be out of hearing: what the eggheads get up to is none of his business. His a.s.signment is protection and to that end he keeps glancing around, peering into the forest. Now and then he touches the gun, as if for rea.s.surance.

Compton says, 'Oppie, whatever made you come a thousand miles to the Canadian border, it must be deadly serious.

Oppenheimers face is grim. 'Teller thinks the bomb will set light to the atmosphere, maybe even the oceans.

Compton stops. 'What?

Oppenheimer pats the briefcase. 'Ive brought his calculations.

The studious one, Lev Petrosian, speaks for the first time since they arrived. His English is good and clear with just a hint of a German accent. 'He thinks atmospheric nitrogen and carbon will catalyse fusion of the hydrogen. Heres the basic formula. He hands over a sheet of paper.

Compton studies it for some minutes, while walking. Finally he looks up at his colleagues, consternation in his eyes. 'Jesus.

Oppenheimer nods. 'A smart guy, our Hungarian. At the fireball temperatures were talking about you start with carbon, combine with hydrogen all the way up to nitrogen-15, then you get your carbon back. Meantime youve trans.m.u.ted four hydrogen atoms into helium-4 and fired out gamma rays all the way up the ladder.

'h.e.l.l, Oppie, we dont even need to create the nitrogen. Its eighty per cent of the atmosphere. And weve already got the carbon in the CO2, not to mention plenty of hydrogen in the water. If this is right it makes the atmosphere a devils brew. Compton shakes his head. 'But it cant be right. It takes millions of years to turn hydrogen into deuterium.

Petrosian says, 'About one hydrogen atom in ten thousand is deuterium. Its already there in the atmosphere.

'You mean...

'G.o.d has fixed our atmosphere beautifully. Hes made it so it by-pa.s.ses the slow reactions in the ladder. The rates are speeded up from millions of years to a few seconds.

'When does the process trigger?

'It kicks in at a hundred million degrees. The bomb could reach that.

Oppenheimer coughs slightly and stops to light up a cigarette. 'We could turn the planet into one huge fireball.

'What does the Pope think? And Uncle Nick? Compton is referring to Enrico Fermi and Neils Bohr, atomic physicists whose names are so sensitive that they are referred to by nickname even within the barbed wire enclave of Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer takes a nervous puff. 'They dont know yet. I want us to check it out first. Well work on it overnight.

Compton picks up a stone and throws it into the water. They watch the ripples before they carry on walking.

'Out with it, Oppenheimer says.

Comptons tone is worried. 'Oppie, look at the big picture. The U-boats have just about strangled the British. Hitlers troops are occupying Europe from the North Cape to Egypt Russias just about finished and Ill bet a dime to a dollar Hitler will soon push through Iran and link up with the j.a.ps in the Indian Ocean. The Germans and the j.a.ps will soon have the whole of Asia, Russia and Europe between them.

'So?

'So then Hitler will be over the Bering Straits and through Canada like a knife through b.u.t.ter. By the time he gets there h.e.l.l be stronger than us. We have a two-thousand-mile border with the Canadians, Oppie, its indefensible, and I dont want my hideaway to be five minutes flying time from Goerings Stukas.

Oppenheimers intense blue eyes are fixed on the lake, as if he is looking over the horizon to Canada. 'Thats a grand strategic vision, Arthur. But whats your point?

'Ten minutes ago that grand strategic vision didnt bother me. So long as we won the race to build the gadget, wed be okay. But how can we take even the slightest chance of setting the atmosphere alight? Im sorry, Oppie, but given a straight choice wed be better to accept n.a.z.i slavery.

Oppenheimer nods reluctantly. 'Ive lost a lot of sleep over this one, Arthur, but I have to agree. Unless we can be a hundred per cent sure that Teller is wrong, the Bomb must never be made.