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A FAMILIAR IMAGE, a portrait, taken by one of our artificial satellites: bluish-purple sickle of the Earth, and the ash-grey Moon, hanging like paper masks in the dark emptiness.
‘Get closer,’ said the old man.
Soundlessly, the cart went forward. The screen, flat as a piece of paper, was set face-high.
‘Stop,’ he commanded.
In human minds, Earth and its satellite were a binary rule, a constant. Until now.
The old man peered fixated at the third object, hovering between Earth and Moon. It was artificial in origin, spherical in shape, with the dimensions of a smaller asteroid. In actuality, it was a spacecraft.
The spacecraft was observed for the first time at the distance of six light hours from Earth. It passed Pluto’s orbit with great speed, and then started deaccelerating rapidly. No human-made spacecraft could intercept it. In a few weeks’ time, it reached Earth. Then, it just stopped in its orbit, four hundred kilometres from the planet’s surface. It didn’t respond to radio transmissions. A silent behemoth, hanging over the heads of the distressed people of Earth.
Naturally, a mission was sent.
Up close, it looked like metal debris. The shuttle crew described it as ‘a superball made of crumpled up tinfoil.’ The ‘superball’ was two kilometres in diameter and noticeably dilapidated. Its surface consisted of wrinkled metal, sporadically shiny and unscathed, and myriads of metal plates resembling roof-tiles, which apparently, at some point in the past, covered the whole surface of the outer plating evenly.
One day, the ship’s door opened automatically upon receiving a simple radio-command. On Earth, billions and billions of eyes gazed at as many screens. We weren’t alone any more. No, not any more.
The mission crew discovered two important things.
First: there were no living beings on the ship. There was an auto-pilot, a machine equipped with navigation devices as well as an explicit program. The robust-looking machine evidently hadn’t been created by creatures resembling humans; the devices on the ship looked more as if they grew from its walls than if they had been assembled in a factory.
Second: the ship was, by all means, some sort of tanker. It carried several million tons of frozen ammonia, a compound already present on Earth, in huge quantities. It was not something we had any shortage of.
Earth’s scientists tried to duplicate the ship’s propulsion system, but to no avail. They couldn’t even get it running again. All the machines on board had stopped working from the moment of its arrival. The ship was now just a wreck circling the Earth, its new satellite. An idea was voiced to turn it into an orbital station. That failed, too. The problem was, how to get rid of that huge amount of ammonia? Even if it was feasible to just release it into space, it would be ill advised. A ring of frozen crystals would form around the Earth, destroying artificial satellites, disrupting orbital traffic and space research, and creating a slew of meteor showers that would rain upon Earth’s surface. For all those reasons, the ship was ultimately left alone.
In the night sky, beside the Moon, people could now also gaze upon a sparkling spot that was the alien spaceship.
Once a month, research groups visited it in the attempt to try and solve at least some part of the cosmic puzzle.
‘I did some calculations,’ said the old man quietly. ‘We know that the ship came from the direction of a yellow dwarf, Tau Ceti. Its position is exactly eleven point eight light-years away from here.’
The twitchy youth sat in an armchair opposite the old man’s mechanised wheelchair. Astrophysics was his field of study, as was the old man’s. The old man used to be one of the top researchers of his kind. He had invited the youth, with whom he often cooperated, to confide his theory.
‘Continue,’ the visitor said.
‘Well, it occurred to me,’ the old man started, ‘I don’t know if anyone else thought about it… that my late friend Visheslavsky, in 1966, meddled with something that was later named ‘SETI’ and whatnot…’
‘You mean, the transmission of radio-signals to nearby star systems?’ his young interlocutor asked.
‘Yes, but there’s more to that… Visheslavsky believed that he came across a signal that was artificial in origin. He recorded it, tried to decipher it. Ultimately, he failed, but he sent back the parts of that signal, back towards the star Tau Ceti…’
‘You are trying to say…’
‘The signal travelled to Tau Ceti for eleven point eight light years. Someone received it. Then, an automated starship was sent. It is the year 2003 now. So, the ship travelled a tad over twenty-five years. Its speed is just under half of speed of light. Now it’s here, and we don’t know why, even though it evidently came here upon our call…’
‘It fits,’ the young man commented.
‘Yes. And I think I know something more about the nature of this ship’s mission. By inventing a radio telescope, we humans have invented a kind of… cosmic telephone. Scientists like Visheslavsky acted like naughty children, playing with it out of boredom, calling random numbers. And eventually we stumbled upon a number that was in use, and someone “answered the call…”’
The ship gleamed in the sun. the few tourists that came to see it gathered loose parts of its plating as souvenirs. Among the many bright spots that were stars, far away from us, was also the yellow star of Tau Ceti, the origin point of the space colossus. Tourists were people of deep pockets but shallow intellect. They didn’t bother themselves by thinking about the purpose of the contraption under their feet, no more than most of humanity. People were curious at first, but time passed, and mass-media used up all of theories and speculations. Now the ship represented only some kind of a cosmic Stonehenge.
‘Visheslavsky “ordered” something from Tau Ceti without even knowing it, without even dreaming that such thing was possible. First contact between two civilisations took place on purely market-related bases. Imagine, if you will, a cosmic equivalent of a delivery corporation. What Visheslavsky received and then sent back, in an altered form, was perhaps some kind of an ad, or prospect…’
The guest sat quietly, deep in thought after the old man had finished with his presentation. And then he went pale. Quivered.
‘But… if there exists some sort of cosmic equivalent of a business transaction,’ he said, ‘then there must also be an… outstanding fee!’ |
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