Fundamental Force Episode One (3 page)

“They won’t
agree so quickly, it’s too soon.”

“Oh, but they
will! They need publicity on any pretext right now. And it’s such a
hot topic, the first time with you on such a show... They’ll take
the bait and you’ll knock them out of the election campaign once
and for all. So what about it? Unless you yourself do not intend to
celebrate the event as it deserves...”

The plan
sounded tempting. Knowing that LeRoy had a nose for such things, he
could be sure that it would work out just as he had said. He would
be killing two birds with one stone, taking out his two most
dangerous political rivals. And if the project went as planned, the
chances of those two competing successfully in the forthcoming
elections would be zero. The president sighed heavily and set his
unfinished glass aside.

“Not in my
wildest dreams...”

“Close the
door, please,” said Shelby.

There were only
two circumstances when Professor Shelby, the dean of his
astrophysics faculty, kept his door closed when he was inside: when
he was on the phone to his wife and when something extremely
important was going on.

Steve
obediently closed the door behind him.

“I told you
about our meeting with the president in Canada, didn’t I? Directly
after the aliens screwed up in Andromeda?” asked Shelby, settling
in his chair and motioning to Steve to sit in the chair
opposite.

“I believe so,
yes...”

“I thought at
the time that he was joking.”

“Who?”

“The
president.”

“I thought he
never joked, even if he was being witty.”

“You got that
right... The day the aliens tried to go on an excursion to
Andromeda, MacQueen and I immediately flew to the president. To
inform him at first hand, so to speak, and to receive further
instructions.”

“Interesting...”

“As soon as he
learned what had happened, his eyes lit up. Really twinkled. ‘If
they’ve left a vacancy,’ he said, ‘it would be foolish not to fill
it.’”

“Just the
reaction you might expect from a professional politician...”

“It now seems
to me too that it was to be expected, very much so. A reflex, you
might say. But at the time, I was rather surprised. Yes... And what
do you think of the idea?”

“Of what idea?
A confrontation with the aliens?”

“No, no-one’s
talking about a war. Let’s just say of establishing diplomatic
relations with our galactic neighbors. Thanks to the aliens, we now
know where to look for them.”

“You mean the
Gliese system?”

Shelby
nodded.

“I don’t know,”
replied Steve. “I’m not a diplomat. After all, we have already
established some sort of relations with the aliens...”

“So we have,
but now they have left us without even saying goodbye.”

“Yes, but there
is a reason for that.”

“But that
doesn’t bind us to anything. What, are we not allowed to fly
anywhere now?”

“Why shouldn’t
we fly anywhere? I’ve nothing against making contact with our
neighbors, but in the case of Gliese, they are not just our
neighbors, but part of their civilization. Who knows how jealous
the parent state might be, if there is one? I reckon it would be a
dangerous move. I wouldn’t provoke them. Who knows how they’d take
it?”

“I completely
agree with you. But that isn’t what those up there” – Shelby
pointed upwards – “want to hear from you.”

“So what would
they like me to say?”

“They would
like to know how to check that.”

“How should I
know?”

“Well, you are
running a project involving the monitoring of communications in the
gravity band, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I
am.”

“So that makes
you the master in electronic intelligence concerning the aliens.
All other methods of communication are limited to the speed of
light, consequently we can only extract up-to-date information from
gravity communications. After all, it takes hundreds of thousands
of years for a signal to reach the other edge of the galaxy, so
that makes you the possessor of vary rare information. That’s why
your opinion is important.”

“I do have an
opinion, but they reject it as unsuitable. As a scientist...”

“Steve, here in
the university you are a scientist living in the world of science,
but if they involve you in this project, you will be in another
universe. The universe of politics. They have their own laws of
nature, unlike normal people.”

“Do you mean
no-one is going to ask me if I want to become involved?”

“That brings me
to another question: do you want to leave the military to face the
aliens one-to-one?”

Instead of
replying, Steve pressed his lips together in a sign of
disapproval.

“All right,
let’s get back to our observations. On their basis, what can you
say about the state of their civilization?”

“After that
Andromeda fiasco, their activity fell sharply and has remained at
the same low level ever since. The portals, in the form in which we
saw them near the Solar System, no longer exist. On the whole, I
think the theory about their collapse is correct. There can’t be
any other explanation.”

“Concerning the
spheres around the stars from which they obtain their energy. Like
the one they wanted to build around us...”

“The problem of
the speed of light arises here. The spheres are only visible in the
electromagnetic band and these waves need time to reach us. So in
that respect, there are no changes yet. Of course I am referring to
a distance of no more than five light years – after all, this
happened five years ago, didn’t it? And we don’t know if the
spheres still exist at such a distance.”

“By the way,
how many spheres have we detected so far? Eight, did you say?”

“About
ten.”

“And now remind
me where exactly...”

Shelby gestured
to the computer. The window glass darkened, plunging the room into
semi-shadow. A huge hologram of the Milky Way appeared in the
center of the office. Billions of shining stars floated slowly past
the bookcases, rotating around the bright center of the galaxy, and
the room was instantly transformed, the vivid, amazingly lifelike
hologram filling it with an incredible beauty.

Steve stood up
and, without taking long to think about it, pressed on several
points with his finger.

“Here, here,
here, here... And here too. Interesting that there is an
accumulation of spheres appearing in this region. It looks as if
the mother planet of their civilization must be somewhere in this
sector... They clearly began their expansion from this point in the
galaxy.”

Shelby suddenly
started up from his chair to get a better view of the place in the
hologram to which Steve’s finger was pointing.

“Interesting...
We always assumed that life was born in other sectors of the Milky
Way...”

“Yes, in
quieter ones. But this does not mean that they colonized the galaxy
from their cradle. Something similar took place here on Earth. Life
was born in Africa, but the greatest expansions of civilization
took place elsewhere: Mongolia, Europe, China... Anywhere you like,
in fact, but not Africa.”

Steve fell
silent, mulling over a thought that had unexpectedly come into his
head.

“By the way,
are there already volunteers for this mission?”

“What do you
mean?”

“Well, to
become heroic voyagers... That’s a one-way ticket. It’s 20 light
years to the Gliese system, after all...”

“But would you
not like to be one of them?”

“Me? Not for
the world! I have things to do here on Earth. I couldn’t even get
used to Mars, let alone another star system. Or even worse to open
space, inside a tin can...”

“And if it were
not a one-way journey?”

“That’s another
matter... although it still depends on how long the flight would
take. I could maybe stand a year or two, but no longer. Anyway,
that’s all fantasy, the portals are not possible any more, thanks
to the magicians from Andromeda.”

Steve returned
silently to his seat without taking his eyes off Shelby.

“Professor, I
feel there is something you are not telling me...”

Shelby gave a
sign to make the windows transparent. The hologram faded at once
and the room became a normal office again. Voices from outside,
which had been heard only in muffled form, suddenly became sharper,
filling the room with animated sound.

“Maybe, maybe.
The future will show.”

Steve stood up
and picked up his jacket.

“Then we’ll
wait.”

“By the way,
have you heard what this new project is called?” asked Shelby,
holding out his hand in farewell.

“It looks as if
I’m always the last to know. No, I haven’t heard.”

“Supremacy.”

“Supremacy...
As the name of a project to establish diplomatic relations...”
Steve shook his head in disapproval. “That’s not a good sign, not
good at all...”

There was an
incredible crush in the corridors. By tradition, this was Open
Doors Day in the university, allowing the professors and their
assistants to praise their faculties to school pupils.

Forcing his way
through the crowd of future students, Steve looked for Auditorium
A3, which was where Clive usually performed this function. He was a
creature of habit and always selected the same auditorium for his
lectures, which made it much less difficult to find him.

The door to the
packed auditorium was open and Clive’s voice, amplified by
microphones, could be heard from within. There were so many wanting
to listen to what he had to say that there were not enough seats
for them. The school pupils were sitting and standing in passages
and on steps, some even within the doorways. Among the young faces,
sporting fluff instead of moustaches and beards and some still with
child-like rounded cheeks, were some a little older. They differed
from the younger ones in that they were carefully taking notes of
what was being said.

To the sound of
muffled whispers, Steve forced his way through the crowd. Gently
pushing through the mass of people, he proceeded deeper into the
hall.

“Let me pass
please, excuse me, sorry,” he kept on repeating, stepping over the
many legs, arms and satchels of those sitting on the floor. The
school pupils shyly moved out of the way to let him through. There
was only a difference of a few years between them and the students,
but what a difference in behavior... If he’d tried to force his way
so unceremoniously into a hall full of students, he would have been
eaten alive!

Clive suddenly
stopped speaking when he noticed the annoying motion being caused
by Steve as he pressed forward through the tangled undergrowth of
people’s bodies. Steve waved to Clive in greeting. The irritated
expression on Clive’s face was instantly replaced by one of
pleasant surprise. He nodded in reply, then turned back to his
presentation display on an enormous screen.

“Here on Earth,
the speed of light may seem incredibly fast, even instantaneous,
but in space, everything is quite different. Even the distances
within our own star system, however negligible they may be on the
scale of the Universe, are so great that photons of light need
minutes and even hours to traverse them...”

Steve moved on
without stopping, getting closer to the stage, half-listening to
Clive’s speech as he went. Today, his voice sounded strange in the
auditorium somehow, unusual. For him, an assistant professor in a
complex technical discipline, this was quite remarkable. Yes, the
appearance of the aliens had meant that their specialty was the one
most in demand in the entire university, but the difficult
technical subject matter unceremoniously separated the true space
romantics from those simply following the current fashion, who
could barely last one semester. The lecture halls, packed to
bursting at the beginning of the year, rapidly thinned out after
the first exams.

“The finite
speed of light gives us astrophysicists more trouble than anything
else,” continued Clive. “It is something which restricts our
frontier of knowledge in the Universe. When we turn our telescope
lenses to the limitless expanses of space, we catch the light of
remote stars and galaxies. That is how we learn about the Universe.
Unfortunately, the only light available for observation is that
which has had time to reach our Solar System.

“As you know,
our Universe was formed fourteen billion years ago. Over this
period only the light from those galaxies at a distance of not more
than fourteen billion light years has had time to reach us. It is
this distance which is the horizon of our knowledge in the
limitless sea of stars.”

Steve
eventually stopped, deciding he was now sufficiently close to the
podium. With his back resting against the nearest wall, he began
paying more attention to what Clive was saying as he waited for the
event to end. They usually ended at eight, so he could wait fifteen
minutes, even in this uncomfortable position.

Clive stopped
talking and pointed to somewhere in the hall where a hand had gone
up requesting permission to speak.

“But the aliens
could travel faster than the speed of light, couldn’t they?”

Clive, who
could not abide questions about the aliens, threw a quick glance at
Steve. Clive was just like a colleague of theirs who had been born
in Transylvania and hated questions about vampires. But the
situation obliged him to explain patiently.

“During our
observations, they moved at sub-light speed. They never once
exceeded the speed of light.”

“Even so, they
were able to move from one star to another through their portals.
Is that not exceeding the speed of light?”

“In order to
understand the concept of the finite speed of light, we must go
into the details. Our everyday experience tells us that speed
cannot be finite and physicists long accepted this falsely obvious
concept, taking it as axiomatic. To their dismay, the better our
instruments became, the more precise our experiments were and the
more obvious it was that there was something wrong with their idea
of speed. It took many centuries for scientists to finally resolve
this riddle.