The 2084 Precept (6 page)

"And," he continued, "even if he
started—after all, the chance of another €400,000 without a risk is
not to be sniffed at—it is less than likely that he would continue
for the whole program unless…unless, that is…the sum of money
waiting for him at the end were large enough to constitute an
adequate enticement."

"Well Mr. Parker, that obviously provokes my
next question. May I know the subject of your thesis, and could you
please elaborate as to why it is apparently so crazy that you are
prepared to pay a small fortune for what sounds like some
relatively simple assistance?"

He took a sip of water, and paused for a
moment. And then he said "The subject of my thesis is the Earth.
The planet. This planet."

"Well…O.K…but I still don't understand. I
mean, exactly what is the overall subject involved, and what
academic area are you working in? Which university are you
attending, what is the big mystery in all of this? And why for that
matter are you a student anyway—at your age and owning what seems
to be a reasonably well-established group of companies?"

"Ah," he said with that agreeable smile of
his, "a lot of questions, only to be expected of course from a
person such as yourself, and presumably you will have several more
in that vein. So…allow me to get straight to the point." He
coughed. "I am an alien."

"You are an alien? Immigrant or just
visiting? Which country? Legal or illegal?"

"I note that you are thinking in U.S. terms
regarding the common usage of that word. Indeed, the dictionary
itself describes the word alien as 'foreigner' or 'foreign'. Which
indeed, I am, but not quite as you think. I am, to be more precise,
an extraterrestrial."

Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. So it's not a
fraud after all, he's just insane, nutty as a fruitcake, totally
bonkers, off his rocker. That is not to say that I have any major
complaints, after all I
was
after a bit of fun and now I'm
certainly getting it. What a story for the Green Tree pub. And my
chances for the €100,000 have definitely risen a notch. This guy
might be as crazy as the best of them, but he also appears to have
money and he might
really
be mad enough to have transferred
that cash already, who knows? Well, I don't know, and maybe he
hasn't, maybe he just tapped away on his laptop to give me that
impression.

On the other hand…I am happy to take the
chance. It's worth finding out. I have to be careful though.
Lunatics, even apparently harmless ones, can be dangerous, turn
violent in a second, you're dead before you know it, stay wary and
on your toes, all of the time, oh yes.

Meantime, it would be appropriate for me to
switch into full actor mode, humor the guy, put my psychological
talents to work, another of the skills which serve me well as a
consultant. Well, well, well, who would have thought? What a
Saturday!

"An extraterrestrial?" I asked, as
innocently as a whore telling you she's in love with you. "Now
that's interesting. Interesting indeed, but…as I am sure you agree
Mr. Parker…quite unbelievable. Surely you can't expect me to
believe something like that?"

"Oh no, I can’t and I don't," he replied
with that smile of his, "not at all. I mean, who would? No indeed,
but hopefully you will bear with me while I try to explain and,
again, I hope to have convinced you in the end anyway. And by then,
you will hopefully have been able to discard the thoughts you are
harboring about whether or not I am a lunatic, or dangerous, or
both." He smiled again, leaned forward a little, both elbows on the
table, and said, "Now that is a reasonable goal for our meeting,
wouldn't you agree?"

Well, Mr. Jeremy Parker, I thought to
myself, you are right about the dangerous bit, and I've already
decided about the lunatic part all by myself, right up-front, sorry
about that. And I took a drink of water to fortify myself for the
effluence I was about to hear, a shot of whiskey would have been
more appropriate.

* * * * *

"I should," he continued, "perhaps begin
with where I come from, how I got here, and why I look and sound
like a human being, albeit an insane one as far as you are
concerned; at the moment anyway."

Feel free, old chap. And I can help you
here. The reason you look like a human being is because you
are
a human being. And the repetitions, including the
insanity one again, clearly indicate you are a neurotic one.

"It happens," he said, "that your scientists
are now beginning to notice things which are very far away. They
have recently discovered a quasar which they have named
APM02879+5255. A quasi-stellar radio source, or quasar in its
abbreviated form, is an unimaginably—for you—hot and bright object
in the center of a galaxy, fueled by a vast input of matter being
dragged into a supermassive black hole, as you call it,
supermassive being a term you use to denote anything of around 1
billion solar masses or more. It is very hot, tens of millions of
degrees, and very, very bright, thousands of trillions of
megawatts."

He paused and looked at me for a moment,
presumably in case I was going to accuse him of exaggerating his
numbers. Which I wasn't. Maybe he was right, maybe he wasn't, I
hadn't a clue.

"Now this particular quasar," he continued,
"is about 12 billion light years distant from you, using your U.S.
term for a billion by the way. And your light year is a measure of
distance, not time. You calculate it by multiplying the speed of
light, which in your terms is over 1 billion kilometers per hour,
by 365.25. In other words, your light year represents slightly less
than 9 trillion kilometers, give or take a bit. And I'll leave you
to calculate the rest, the impossible number of lifetimes you would
need to be able to even come close."

Well…at least we both understand a billion
to be a thousand million. This is no longer exclusive to the
Americans, by the way. The Brits, as in so many things, have copied
them and it is nowadays more or less common usage in the U.K. as
well. Not so, however, in Germany, for example. Their billion
remains the English Long Scale version, a million millions, just as
it always was. And a trillion is a million billions as opposed to a
thousand billions, just as it always was. And yes, the Germans have
created a different word -
Milliarde
- to denote a thousand
million. Useful to know if you are a translator. Or even if you're
not.

"Whatever…" he continued, "you are not
seeing things as they are at present, you are seeing what was there
long before your solar system even existed, let alone, of course,
yourselves. And what you are looking at is approximately 35,000
times the mass of your sun—mass not to be confused with size—and it
emits about 1 trillion times as much energy; yes, that's one
trillion, if you can imagine that, which you can't.”

He looked at me, presumably to see if I was
interested in this particular monologue of his. Which I wasn’t. But
I was pretending to be. Well enough for him to persevere.

“To enable you to put this into
perspective”, he continued, “your sun has a maximum temperature of
around 15 million degrees centigrade at its core, and its nuclear
fusion converts roughly 700 million tons of hydrogen into helium
and energy in the form of gamma rays
every second
, thereby
emitting some 400 trillion megawatts of power. So just try
imagining a quasar like this one."

"What exactly is a megawatt?" I asked. Keep
him humored, let him think I find all of this interesting. But
don't overdo it, don't give the game away, keep it simple.

"A megawatt? A megawatt is a million
watts."

"Uh huh…difficult for me to grasp the
magnitude of the numbers you're talking about here, Mr. Parker."
Small talk, keep up the interest.

"I know," he said, "I am aware of that if
you don't mind my saying so. Just imagine yourself trying to
explain your planet to a group of ants in your garden, assuming you
could converse with them. They would hear you, but you would know
in advance that they could not possibly understand the immensity
and complexity of what you were explaining. And that is the
position I find myself in with your good self, no offence intended
at all, it's just the way things are."

I didn't say anything, no point. Lunatics
live in a world of their own creation, there's nothing you can do
about it. And be thankful for small mercies, I told myself, at
least he's not pretending to be Napoleon, with his cavalry waiting
for him around the corner at Waterloo. Waterloo Station, I mean,
just over the river from here.

"To continue," he said, "I and my brothers
currently live in that region. We have a planet, which circles a
star, which is close to 500 times larger than yours. Not as large,
for example, as Eta Carinae, a star of which your scientists are
aware and which is 800 times larger than your sun and which, as
they also know, will soon explode, a supernova you call it. In
fact, the biggest star you are aware of is the one you call Canis
Majoris, which is a red giant and on its way to being two thousand
times larger than your sun. Your scientists also believe they have
detected a few stars which are even larger, but their measurement
accuracy is too uncertain due to either cosmic dust clouds or to
other phenomena. And your scientists are guessing that there are
even larger stars than those out there which they can't see. And it
just so happens that they are right."

"So let me describe my star," he continued,
"as being a medium-big one. In all other respects it is similar to
your sun, in that it is a sphere of hydrogen and helium
gases—nearly everything of importance in the universe is a sphere,
as you may know—and, like all other stars, it is en route to its
death, merrily burning away its matter in a chain of nuclear
reactions. In exactly the same way as your sun is doing, which by
the way has about another 4.5 billion years to go. So that's the
region I come from. And now, I assume you will want to know how I
got here, am I correct? Not physically, obviously, and I'll explain
to you why. But to be able to do that, I will first need to give
you a few additional ad hoc ideas concerning the dimensions,
distances and speeds involved in the universe of which you are a
part. So that you can consider the situation in its proper
perspective."

He stood up, picked up his glass of water
and went over to the window, looked out at the building opposite.
Keep silent, I instructed myself, he is clearly in full flow. Full
lunatic flow.

"You are in a galaxy, a word you have chosen
from your Greek language, 'Galaxias'. It actually means milk and is
why you refer to your own galaxy as the Milky Way. You are situated
more towards the outer edge of your galaxy than you are towards the
center, you are in what you call the Orion arm. But even if you
were able to travel at the speed of light, which as I have
mentioned is over 1 billion kilometers per hour, it would still
take you 26,000 years to reach your galaxy's center. Which you
wouldn't want to do, by the way, as the center is something you
call a Black Hole, a relatively small object of almost infinite
density, and about which you still don't know very much. But one
thing you do know, black holes swallow everything that comes within
their sphere of influence. There is no escape, not even for light,
which is why there is nothing there for you to actually see,
nothing at all. But believe me, Mr. O'Donoghue, you wouldn't want
to have your planet situated even
halfway
closer to your
galaxy's center, because the cosmic radiation would kill all life.
You wouldn't exist, you couldn't exist. Your planet's fortuitous
location within its galaxy is just one of the many, many random
circumstances which allow it to harbor life."

He stopped and looked at me. I looked back
again. He gave me one of his polite smiles and continued with his
astronomy lesson.

"Your galaxy contains about 200 billion
suns, or stars as you also call them. Quite a lot you may think.
But some galaxies have a lot more. And, you may well ask, how many
galaxies are there? Well, some of your estimates say there are
about 400 billion. Quite a large place you might think…but that
only refers to a part of it, the part you know and can 'see' and
which you call the universe. And if I were to tell your scientists
that there are over a trillion of their so-called universes, why,
they would simply laugh at me."

He turned from the window and peered at me
to see if I was going to laugh as well. But I wasn't, at least not
until I had checked my bank account.

"And if I were then to tell them," he
continued, "that in fact there are not a trillion galaxies but an
infinite number, that there is no 'end', that they go on into
infinity, why, then they wouldn't even bother to laugh. And that's
because the only concept they are capable of grasping at the moment
is the one in which everything, absolutely everything, has a
'beginning' and an 'end'."

He peered at me again, but you could have
mistaken me for a stone Buddha.

"Now, as you probably know, everything in
your universe, and I mean everything, is moving. Your planet itself
is spinning around on itself in a counterclockwise direction—as
viewed from your north celestial pole, i.e. from the direction of
the star you call Polaris—at a speed of around 1,000 kilometers per
hour. At least for you that is, where you live—if you lived near
your equator, it would be closer to 1,500 kilometers per hour, not
that you would notice the difference. One full turn is what you
call a day. And as well as rotating on its own axis, your planet is
travelling around your sun, also counterclockwise, at a speed of
over 100,000 kilometers per hour, and one complete round trip is
what you call a year. Your moon of course follows you, while at the
same time circling you at differing speeds, fairly slow, let's say
at an average of 3,000 kilometers per hour and—surprise—also in a
counterclockwise direction. Your sun itself rotates of course, and
also in a counterclockwise direction, but being a plasma of hot
gases as opposed to a solid, it simultaneously rotates at differing
speeds depending not only on latitude, but on other factors such as
depth, gas composition and so on. At its equator, one complete
external rotation takes 25.6 earth days. It is also speeding along
at your galaxy’s current speed of around 1,000,000 kilometers per
hour, pulling you along with it of course. And you have various
conflicting theories as to why your galaxy’s speed is increasing,
but we don’t need to go into the reasons here and you wouldn't be
able to understand them anyway. Sorry…no offence intended Mr.
O'Donoghue."