The Rock (8 page)

VOYAGER 

The Edge of the Solar System

21 DECEMBER 1995, 0100 ZULU

Outside the orbit of the farthest planet in the solar system, the effects of the sun are still present. A continuous stream of charged particles from the sun's magnetic field is swept by the solar wind and creates a huge bubble-like structure known as the heliosphere. From mankind's perspective it serves a most useful function by keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and slowing the entry of cosmic rays.

Voyager 2, intrepid visitor of four planets and fifty-seven moons during the past eighteen years, was only a third of the way to the edge of the heliosphere but well beyond the orbit of Pluto-a vast, empty hinterland where there is little for the probe's scanners to search out and examine. Indeed, most of the equipment on board the Voyager was turned off shortly after the probe passed Neptune in August of 1989. Since that time only the spectrometer-a device that detects ultraviolet radiation--has been kept active.

With its large dish oriented back into the plane of the planets and the high-gain antenna in the center centered on Earth, Voyager heads for the edge of the heliosphere, projected to reach it by the year 2000. The plutonium power on the probe is expected to run out in 2020. After that, it is estimated that it will take Voyager millions of years before it comes close to another star.

When Voyager was launched in 1977, there were people who believed shooting out into space what was essentially a guidebook back to Earth might not have been the most prudent idea. Those worries were overruled. After all, the scientists argued, the radio and television rays from Earth were much farther out already than Voyager would ever reach intact. Those rays not only pinpointed Earth's stellar location but also depicted life--and not a very flattering one, as a survey of the channels indicates--on Earth.

At precisely 0100, Greenwich mean time, the transmitter secreted away in the guts of the probe powered up and began pulsing out a binary code representing the readings from the spectrometer for the past twenty-four hours. The radio waves began their four-hour, ten-minute, twenty-three-second trip back to Earth to be gathered in at the deep-space communications center near Alice Springs, Australia, where a giant dish would grudgingly turn from higher priority missions to gather in Voyager's data during its fifteen minute daily allocation of dish time.

Seven minutes later--four and a half billion miles into its seventeen-year journey and midway through the transmission--Voyager 2's journey ended abruptly.

DSCC 14, Australia

21 DECEMBER 1995, 1440 LOCAL

21 DECEMBER 1995, 0510 ZULU

Hawkins felt the pounding of a massive headache behind his eyes. For the past several hours they had learned quite a bit about meteor-burst transmitting, Ayers Rock, digital encoding, and various other information, but it had added little to their understanding of the situation.

Mentally tuning out the headache, Hawkins slapped the end of his pointer on the surface of the easel. "All right, I know this seems rather simplistic, but bear with me. Basically we've got four items here."

NUCLEAR BLAST VREDEFORT DOME

VOYAGER INFORMATION

MESSAGE TO Five SITES (Including Vredefort Dome)

OUR NAMES

"I don't think you should have those arrows. None of those items necessarily follows from the previous one." Levy's quiet voice filled the room. "I would admit that the Voyager information was the step prior to the message, since that information was used in making up the message. But how did our names come up?"

Hawkins shrugged. "We'll get to that later. I'm more concerned about the connection with the bombing. There's one more of those nuclear weapons out there missing. If whoever is behind these messages is involved with the bombs, we need to find that out."

Hawkins didn't think they should talk about the touchstone theory in front of Lamb. Levy's point had been valid, but if it was true, there wasn't too much they could do about it. Besides, there were still several other factors that didn't quite fit into that theory-at least not that he could see. It was those other factors that they were examining now.

"Look at those reception sites and add in the Rock." Levy was holding up a world map with the six red circles. "What does the spatial layout make you think?"

"One for each inhabited continent," Hawkins noted. Something had been bugging him for a while. "What if the others were diversions?"

"What?" Fran looked puzzled.

"What if the only true message was sent to South Africa, but the other ones were sent to throw us off track?" Hawkins warmed to the theme. It was something he might have done. "We're sitting here looking at where those beams terminated, but that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be anything there. We have no record of transmissions from those sites."

"Or there might have been something there once upon a time and it no longer exists," Levy commented. "But getting back to the layout of the six sites: Let's stop being egocentric and turn our gaze outward. Note that three are in the northern hemisphere and three are in the southern. Note that each set of three is laid out in a pattern that splits the world into three roughly equal parts."

Lamb had entered while Hawkins was showing the diagram, and he now spoke for the first time. "If you wanted to set up monitors to cover the whole world you might space them out like that. Maybe the Russians put together some sort of monitoring system in the past and the explosion at Vredefort damaged it?"

Levy was shaking her head thoughtfully. "No. That's not what I'm talking about. Think about where we're sitting right now. Why is this tracking station here in Australia?"

"So we can always have contact with our satellites and probes when they're on the far side of the globe from the United States," Fran answered.

"Right," Levy said, and waited.

Fran was the first to catch on. "Wait a minute! Are you saying that these six sites are the same thing? Monitoring or relay sites to space? But there's nothing there at the other sites!"

"There was nothing in Ayers Rock that we knew of until it sent out the message," Hawkins noted.

Levy pointed back at Hawkins's diagram. "We all seem to be ignoring the fact that the message relayed the data off Voyager 2 with the addition of our names. Yet Voyager is almost out of the solar system. How could someone have gotten that information?"

"They don't necessarily have to have gotten it off the satellite itself," Batson replied. "That information is available in data bases here on Earth."

"So someone could have just used that Voyager information as a diversion," Lamb said.

Hawkins turned to Lamb. "When this crater woman gets here, we need to pump her for everything about Meteor Crater. I'm sure they've done sonar and electromagnetic resonance soundings in the crater. If not, we need to get some people out there. Maybe there's something in that area similar to what's in the Rock."

"Maybe." Lamb seemed bothered by Levy's quick dismissal of the Russian angle. "The Russians would have wanted to do something like that-set up sites around the world like we have. They could get access to the Voyager plate information--it's public information. Hell, maybe this thing in the Rock dates back to Sputnik"

"What exactly do you think you have in the Rock?" Batson asked. He thumped a folder down on the table in front of him. "I've been going through the data picked up so far and it seems to me that all you know for sure is that there is an anomaly on your sonar and electromagnetic resonance mapping. Nothing on sound. Nothing on radio waves since the one broadcast. All your sonar and EMR tells you is that there is something other than solid rock down about five hundred feet. And the latest data indicate that it is approximately forty feet in diameter and fifteen in depth."

"True," Lamb acknowledged. "That is all we have."

Batson shook his head. "But for all we know that could have been in there forever. No one ever thought of doing any of those tests on the Rock prior to the messages. There is no sign of entryway or exit."

"We've got troops going over the exterior of the Rock and the surrounding area double-checking for that." Lamb replied. "We think it's possible the entry tunnel might be on the northwest side, which has been off limits for years to all but the Aborigines for religious purposes. Something might have been dug on that side and hidden."

"If you find no tunnel, how did it get in there?" Fran asked.

The question went unanswered.

"It gets back to the question of what 'it' is," Batson said. "It also has to be able to transmit through all that rock out into space with sufficient power to override your normal SATCOM traffic. I'm no expert on it, but I'd say we'd have a hell of a time rigging a transmitter to go through five hundred feet of solid rock."

"It's possible," Lamb answered. "We ran that problem through the computer. No one ever thought of doing it through rock before--no reason to--but if it was necessary, and you have a very strong power source, then you could transmit through rock on certain microwave frequencies."

"But where's the power source, then?" Fran asked. "There are too many problems without answers here. She liked working with hard data--here there was no data, just pieces of a puzzle. Except the entire puzzle seemed to be a solid sheet of blackness that they were fumbling with in the dark, trying to connect each piece at a time to another one simply by feel.

"I think this could all be an elaborate setup," Lamb said.

"Setup?" Hawkins repeated. "For what purpose?"

"This is about the bombs," Lamb said. "It's got to be. I think someone is trying to divert our attention from the one still out there. Like Major Hawkins said, our primary concern must--"

He paused as an excited Major Spurlock threw open the door. "Voyager 2 is off-line."

"What?" Lamb asked, confused.

"We just lost it in mid-transmission." He went over to the computer and punched in. "Here, look." The team gathered around and peered over his shoulder. He explained as he typed. "In 1990 the Voyager Planetary Mission was completed and the name was changed to the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) and its priority was lowered."

Digits on the screen transformed themselves into readable data--readable, that is, to someone with a doctorate in astrophysics and experience watching Voyager data play across the screen.

"We give fifteen minutes of down link time to Voyager every twenty-four hour cycle," Spurlock continued. "We get it here, then burst it back into space to an INTELSAT V-F8 Communications Satellite in synchronous orbit above Australia. The satellite relays it to Vallejo Earth Station in California. The logical thing then would be for Vallejo to forward it directly to JPL--Jet Propulsion Labs, who's responsible for Voyager--just down the road, but that isn't what happens. Instead, Vallejo pulses the radio wave back into space to a CONTELASC ASC-l communications satellite, which relays it to the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, which makes a copy of the transmission for their master data banks. Goddard then bounces the message to JPL in California using a GE AMERICOM SATCOM F2R satellite." Spurlock examined the screen. "Normally we don't even look at the data-just relay it. JPL called me just three minutes ago and told me that the data had ended early. I checked and this is what I found."

Data scrolled up and then abruptly ended. "I thought at first that the data had ended because the transmission was finished, but there was still eight minutes of dish time left when this break came and it always takes the full amount of time for all the data to get in."

"Could it be a computer malfunction?" Levy asked.

"I've checked that," Spurlock replied. "No."

"Maybe the damn thing's transmitter just broke," Lamb said.

"We can check on it," Spurlock said.

"How?" Hawkins asked.

Spurlock's fingers pounded the keys as his mind did the math.

"It will take over eight hours before the radio signal I just sent will hit Voyager 2, bounce off the high-gain antenna dish, and return to Earth--basically just like a radar wave would work. A successful bounce back means that Voyager is still out there and the problem lies inside the probe somewhere."

"And if you get no bounce back?" Lamb asked.

"Then Voyager is gone," Spurlock answered.

A long silence filled the room.

"Hell of a coincidence," Hawkins finally muttered.

Lamb shook his head. "You all know as much as I know. I need you to give me some answers. It was your names and not mine transmitted by the Rock." He looked at his watch. "I've got some other things I need to attend to."

Lamb made his way to the door and the door swung shut behind them, leaving the team to ponder this additional piece of information.

FIRST CONTACT DSCC 14, Australia