The Contact Episode One Page 3

croaked on the lake, creating a real concert. It began quietly. First one frog would croak, then another would answer it, a third one would join in, and they were away. Having croaked all they wanted, the frogs gradually quietened down and presumably went peacefully to sleep. Steve liked this concert. These entertaining croaks alone were worth the money Steve was paying for the apartment.

  Steve gradually dragged his thoughts together. He was fully conscious now. He lay on his back entangled in a light blanket. Steve glanced at the clock, which showed ten past two. Half the night over already.

  On the previous evening, Steve had gone to bed early, as soon as he got back from the observatory. He probably lay down at about nine and dropped off straight away. He was no longer hearing frogs. And now he was lying eyes open in the middle of the night, with no desire to sleep at all.

  Generally speaking, Steve did not like going to bed early, because if he did, he would wake up in the middle of the night and then toss and turn until he fell asleep again somewhere about four. This particularly applied if he had to get up early the next morning.

  But he would not have to get up tomorrow, it was a day off, so he could lie in as long as he liked, and think. Steve loved moments like these - lying half asleep and half-dreaming about something, window wide open, wind blowing round the room, quiet, calm, pacifying...

  Steve untangled the blanket, turned on his other side, covered himself properly and closed his eyes. Paradise...

  He was lucky to have come across such a great apartment, trees all round, hardly any people in the area, a lake nearby, and then there were the frogs. On the whole, he had been lucky throughout his life. He had not been a favourite of the teachers in school, he was a bit of a rogue, but he graduated from school with good marks, particularly in the exact sciences, of which he had a very strong grasp. Then he applied to the university, to the astrophysics faculty. There were entrance exams, but Steve passed them without any particular problems. When the semester began, Steve found he had much in common with the other guys in his faculty. Many of them were very much like him. While he was at school, Steve had thought that the university would be full of nerds, but on the whole the students, in his faculty at any rate, weren't bookworms, but they weren't complete dimwits either. Just normal lads, knowing, in their spare time, what to say and what not to say to the female students, but also not forgetting that in a university, you also have to acquire knowledge. In short, the world surrounding Steve was very much like his own internal world, and a stable balance was established in a natural way. In general, life was going as it should.

  On the other hand, his studies were coming to an end, and Steve had not yet decided what he would do after he had got his degree. Should he go into the private sector or go for a post-graduate degree? Projects in the private sector were less impressive than in science; however, they were well paid. Yet science gave you more opportunity to think and to work at a higher intellectual level, but you had to be content with less in the financial sense. Steve was still on the fence.

  Humanity had managed to go far into space. The private sector had already totally assimilated the Solar System within the orbits of the inner planets, and was gradually extending further, beyond the asteroid belt, towards the outer planets. Leisure and educational tours round the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, had been going on for decades and were now quite normal, and indeed practically mandatory for anyone with an interest in space. So normal that you could no longer surprise anyone by the fact that you had been to their orbits.

  Steve himself had now twice viewed the rings of Saturn from a distance of only a few thousand miles. A fascinating spectacle, it must be said. The gigantic sphere of the planet and the even rings round it - Steve could not stop gazing at them for a long time. In the first moments, as their ship was approaching Saturn and the porthole covers were opened, everyone said "Wow!", and Steve felt a lump in his throat, it was so moving to see the power of Nature.

  Towards the end of the journey, on the way back to Earth, Steve had the opportunity to speak to the ship's captain while sitting at the bar. The captain admitted that even after twenty years of space flights and more than a hundred opportunities to see other planets from close up, he was touched anew by the spectacle every time. According to him, his colleagues felt the same, most of them at least. But the captains of transport craft lost all interest after a while. There were even those who while waiting for a cargo in orbit, never even opened the hatch covers to take a glance at the planet in real life. Maybe transporting mundane things such as fuel or minerals dulled the senses. Maybe.

  Steve thought about it, and decided he did not want to become like that. He loved stars, planets and comets. If he had a stone from another planet in his hand, Steve could study it from all sides for a long time, imagining that stone lying on the surface of Mars. A stone has no concept of "life", it can lie for thousands, millions, billions of years, all the time in one and the same place, seeing the planet changing, the oceans evaporating, the atmosphere becoming thinner and thinner as Mars' neighbour Earth came to life, changing from a red-hot rock into an azure pearl. Steve was enchanted by such thoughts when he was turning extraterrestrial stones in his hands.

  Thinking, Steve opened one eye and looked at the table, on which there was just such a stone. Steve had won it at chess from one of his observatory colleagues who had a whole collection of such stones. After winning the stone, Steve had ordered a quartz sphere from the university workshop and sealed this stone inside it. It looked amazingly good. The stone contained iron, which gave it a reddish tint. It was smooth on one side and uneven on the other. Steve, examining it under an electronic microscope, came to the conclusion that the stone had been melted on the smooth side. The irregularities on the other side showed that the stone had been broken from a big rock.

  Steve got up, opened the shutters, leaned out slightly and took a deep breath. The coolness of summer was pleasantly humid from the dew on the grass. There was a barely perceptible aroma from plants of some kind. Two steps from the window stood a mouldering tree stump with several fireflies fluttering round it. Steve took another deep breath and looked out at the night sky. His eyelids became heavy, he felt sleepy. Steve went back to bed, lay down and fell into a deep sleep almost at once. He had no more dreams that night.

  The Doppler Effect

  Steve opened the observatory door and entered the dark hall. The servers twinkled with a calming green light. All the monitors except one were on standby; only one was lit, showing some kind of data. Steve did not switch on the light, he preferred the semi-twilight round his workplace. He went up to it unhurriedly and sat down in the armchair. He put his legs up on the table, which was his favourite pose.

  If Clive had been next to him, he would have certainly begun grumbling. Clive could never understand how you could get anything done in such a position. Firstly the spine was distorted; hadn't Steve been taught to sit up straight? Secondly, feet on the table - what a bad habit, they're dirty.

  Steve brushed aside the books, cups and other clutter, and pressed the button to switch on the console. The whole hall at once came alive with various-coloured lights, monitors lit up showing the latest news accumulated over the past 24 hours - spectral analyses of expected supernovas and far-off galaxies, the orbital characteristics of the bodies of the solar system... In fact, everything was as before. Then Steve remembered the strange object noticed a few days ago. His evening tiredness vanished as if blown away by the wind.

  With the accustomed wave of his hand, Steve called up the log of observations of the object over the past 24 hours. He did not beat about the bush by looking at mathematical models of its flight, he simply started the visualisation. Of course, much that was interesting could not be seen in the visualisation, such as the various trajectory anomalies, but it gave a good idea of the general picture. Real astrophysicists, such as Clive for example, began by digging around in columns of figures before starting something as commonplace as visualisation, but fort
unately Clive was not present.

  "Time scale?" asked the computer.

  Steve rubbed his chin, thinking about it.

  "Make it one to three thousand six hundred."

  At such a scale, each second of the visualisation would represent an hour of real time, and the whole history of the past 24 hours would be shown in less than half a minute. Lights winked on the computer console, and in the blink of an eye, it showed the solar system - the planets, satellites and their orbits round the central star. Twenty-four hours ago, the unknown object had been outside the orbit of Pluto. The simulation went from real time into the scale Steve had set.

  For the first few moments, the object did not move, then it rapidly picked up speed, bypassed the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and passed by Saturn at minimum distance, losing speed as if it had encountered an invisible barrier, got as far as Jupiter and went into orbit round it. The simulation ended, the objects faded and vanished, and the screen filled with columns of figures.

  "Repeat?" asked the computer. Steve suddenly realised that he was sitting there sweating, with his mouth open.

  "Where is the object now?" he asked.

  "In orbit round Jupiter," the computer replied immediately.

  "Is there visual contact?"

  "There is no visual contact at the present time. The object entered the planet's shadow thirty minutes ago. If its orbital trajectory remains unchanged, it is expected to come out of the shadow in one hour twenty-three seconds.

  "During the past 24 hours, the object has entered the field of vision of other telescopes. Request photos of the object?"

  "Yes!"

  The solar system vanished, and the star-filled sky took its place. The computer had only two photos of the unknown object. In the first, the object was seen against the background of the stars. In the second, the object was barely distinguishable against the bright background of Saturn's rings. The pictures were of too low resolution to see the details. The object was only a point of light on them.

  The problem was that the object had not been subjected to direct observation. It had only been visible on those images by chance. All the world's observatories, on Earth, on the Moon and on other planets and satellites, were connected in a single system. Space within the solar system was constantly viewed by various observatories and orbital telescopes - scientific, commercial and military. Special telescopes continuously observed the space routes, supplying information to the Interplanetary Space Flight Centre. Therefore, virtually any sector of solar-system space in the orbital plane of the planets was in the field of vision of some telescope at any moment in time.

  Steve thought about it. The object was nearby, in Jupiter's orbit. By aligning any powerful telescope with Jupiter, it would be possible to determine the size of the object. By joining several telescopes into a linked group, it would be possible to obtain a detailed picture, from which the shape of the object could be found, a spectral analysis of the slide could be made, and other possibilities explored. Steve thought furiously. Clive would be very useful in this situation, he compiled the operating schedule of the telescopes...

  Steve gestured to the computer to start the communication module. Images of people in the observatory's database appeared on the main screen. Steve feverishly leafed through one page after another, looking for Clive. There he was. Connect.

  "Clive Sinclair speaking." Clive's voice rang out all over the hall. He must have been sitting at his desk for the connection to have been made so quickly. Steve