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On Sunday morning Louisa is woken up by the paper-boy who has thrown her newspaper onto the doorstep. He is as regular as clockwork and better than any alarm call, unless she’s had a ‘Saturday night out’ and is dead to the world. She opens the front door of her digs and picks up The Sunday Herald and Globe.
Her heart skips a beat as she unfolds it and looks at the front page. She is quite stunned by the coverage given to their story: the cover and twenty-eight other news pages, albeit of a smaller format!
She finds her mobile phone and calls Anna. “Have you seen The Sunday Herald and Globe?”
“No, I get the Observer, why?”
“Go out and buy up every copy of The Herald and Globe in your newsagent’s; they’ve given twenty-eight pages up to our story!”
“What? Twenty-eight pages?”
“Yes. Can you ring Clive and tell him? I can’t find his number.”
Later that morning, Harry’s phone rings; it’s Clifford.
“Here, I just saw some paper called The Sunday Herald and Globe and they say everything about the aliens that I told their reporter, but in posh language, and I haven’t even got a proper mention. Is this your doing?”
“Sorry Clifford. It’s nothing to do with me. You said you had had an interview with one of their reporters, so it’s up to you to sort it out. Sorry, can’t help!”
Harry phones Gert but gets no reply. So he walks up the lane to her cottage and knocks on the door.
After a long delay, Gert comes to the door in her dressing gown.
“Gert, have you heard the news? Ivan’s article has been published in The Sunday Herald and Globe, describing all the things our young friends were investigating.”
“Sorry, Harry, I couldn’t sleep last night, and this morning I was dead to the world. Did you say they’ve published it all?”
“Yes, everything we saw is there according to the BBC news! Look, I’m just going down to the village to get a copy. Shall I get you one?”
“Oh, how exciting. Yes please, Harry. I’d love to see what they’ve said. I don’t suppose there’s anything about us in it?”
“I don’t know. That wretched Clifford phoned me to say he’d seen it. He wanted to know why he wasn’t included as a vital member of the team of scientists who caused the Black-Out! I think he’d missed the point somewhere, but I’m not sure even he knew what the point was.”
“I like that!” she exclaims. “The team of scientists who caused the Black-Out!”
It’s Monday morning, and for once Anna, Clive and Louisa are not only in on time, but beat their department head to it. Martin arrives a few minutes later. Assad has returned to London.
“We did it!” Ivan beams. “We beat the Spooks and gave the true story, or at least what we know of it, to the World. A million thanks to all of you; thanks team.”
“And to Harry and Gert,” Clive reminds him.
“Yes, I must ring them this morning. Would it be too much to ask you to finish off the analysis of the aliens’ images?”
“Those articles in The Sunday Herald and Globe, or the first of all the series of articles, were fantastic,” Anna says. “How did you do it?”
“Yes, it was, wasn’t it. Assad and I drafted it, Martin corrected all my errors, and when we went to the Judge who had originally issued the Injunction against publication, he read it and agreed that it could be published. The paper didn’t make many changes to the set of articles, except to adapt them to their usual format for a big story, though Assad had taken most of their house style conventions into account, an ‘Exclusive’. And, of course, they wanted to put some adverts in, but there wasn’t much space left over for them.
“What I’ve told the paper is that we are still working on the data from the aliens, and we’ll keep them informed of any new information. It’s the best we can do, but it does put us under some pressure to get the remaining images sorted out and any gaps in the earlier ones filled — where we can.”
“I’m sure we all want to know the rest of the aliens’ story and to try to fill in the gaps,” says Martin. “I certainly do.”
“Thanks, guys. See you for lunch at 1 o’clock at the Roasted Duck? On me, of course!”
“He’s suddenly come into some money!” Louisa jokes.
“Hello, Harry. It’s Ivan. You saw yesterday’s Herald and Globe, of course?”
“Yes. It was great stuff, eh. Well done.”
“Well done to you and Gert, too.”
“We read the whole series of articles together. She was quite overcome at times — tears and lots of paper tissues. I think she feels quite proud.”
“Anyway, thanks! I’ll phone her now.”
“It is OK to phone now?”
“Yes, forget all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Back to normality, whatever that is!”
Ivan dials Gert’s number but gets no reply. Indeed he tries several times with the same result.
The four post-graduate students go back to their conference room and assess where they’ve got to. Apart from a few terms they can’t understand, it seems that everything has been done up to image 16. Image 17 is the usual repeat of image 1 and image 18 seems rather sparse on material. It shows the now familiar image of drawing energy from the Sun, and a number which Martin recognises from earlier data as meaning something under 11,000 years.
Clive wonders if there’s any special reason why the alien star should have stopped in that particular location. Then he is reminded by Louisa that Proxima Centauri is supposed to be the nearest star to the Sun, so it would involve only a relatively small displacement to move it from near Proxima Centauri to near the Sun. If the displacement started 50 million years ago, and was relatively quite slow, it might have arrived where it is fairly recently, and have been captured by the Sun. So their conclusion is that the aliens’ star may actually be in orbit around the Sun. And their earlier conclusion, that the star is really very close, is tentatively confirmed.
Anna reminds the others what Clive said about the Oort cloud, and he adds a few more things he has looked up about it: “Long-term comets are believed to come from the Oort Cloud. Many of them are the result of a sort of tide that permeates the whole galaxy. Others are due to the gravitation of nearby stars and dust clouds. The next star that is likely to perturb the Oort cloud is apparently called ‘Gliese 710’, but that may not be for ten million years! If the aliens’ star is new on the scene, it might now be perturbing the orbits of Oort Cloud members. Could be dangerous!”
“It was suggested quite a few years ago that the Sun’s got a companion, a brown dwarf or giant planet much bigger than Jupiter, in an elliptical orbit inside the Oort cloud. It is known as Nemesis and may pass through a portion of the Oort cloud every 26 million years, bombarding the inner Solar System with comets.”
“So,” remarks Anna, “our aliens’ star may be this Nemesis.”
“It’s possible,” Clive concedes. “But it’s a bit weird and unnerving that Nemesis was the Greek goddess of Revenge and Indignation! Maybe they’ll drain our Sun of more energy before the ten thousand years are up!”
“So we’ve established,” says Ivan to his group of four post-graduate students after they return from the restaurant, “that the aliens have the technology to draw off energy from distant sources, among which are our Sun and our planet, for that matter. Can anyone think of anything we can do that might be adapted to that kind of use?”
There is some silent thought, but no suggestions.
“I remember telling Gert some weeks ago about ‘thinking outside the box’, and that’s what we’ve got to do now. Any thoughts, and I mean just any thoughts that you have, throw them into the arena. It might be total nonsense: that doesn’t matter one iota. It might just set someone else off onto an idea that could bear fruit. Talking of fruit, try this: they’ve managed over the years to send a billion pots of raspberry jam to the Sun, and Pooh Bear is sucking it all up from out there, beyond the Oort Cloud!”
There are grins, grimaces and laughs.
“Why not honey?” Anna asks. “Winnie the Pooh went mad for that, didn’t he? I saw recently that someone has written a cookery book for children called Cooking With Pooh!”
“Yuck! But good, now we’re moving.”
Clive adds: “Well, they’ve definitely found some way of drawing energy off from the Sun. They’ve built a giant energy-sucker.”
“What with? Have they got a licence from Hoover?”
“Suppose they’ve managed to isolate the Higgs boson, and one of its properties is to attract electromagnetic energy as directed?” Louisa suggests.
“I like it,” says Ivan. “What do we know about the Higgs boson?”
Martin says: “It is supposed to have been the particle that gave mass to everything in the universe right after the Big Bang; before then, everything was totally mass-less. Mind you, you wouldn’t have had much time to see these mass-less protons, gluons and whatever else, as the Higgs boson is supposed to have done its job at ten to the power of minus an umpteen billion billionth of a second after the Bang!”
Louisa picks up the thread: “If it’s capable of doing something so fundamental as giving mass to all particles, has it got any other properties like sucking energy?”
“Or is there some other particle that has that property, that we don’t know about?” Ivan asks. “Some particle related to the Higgs boson, that hasn’t even been postulated yet?”
“I suggested the Higgs boson in the first instance, so I’ll have a chat with a couple of friends I’ve got in the Nuclear Physics Department,” Louisa volunteers. “They’re always going on about half-spins, colour, up and down quarks, gravitons, and I don’t know what else, whenever I see them. They may have a useful idea, especially if I set them off thinking ‘outside the box’. Trouble is, they’ll probably want to know how many dimensions the box has.”
“Either ten or eleven,” says Clive, “depending on whose theory of quantum mechanics is in vogue at the time. Tell them to use their branes, that’s b-r-a-n-e-s,” he jokes, but his humour falls on deaf ears.
Martin adds: “Could it be one of these extra dimensions that they’ve brought into play. They are all supposed to be ‘curled up’ somehow, aren’t they? Maybe they could be uncurled and used to grab all this electromagnetism.”
“Or what about string theory? Is there anything in that area that could suck energy?” Anna asks.
“You get a zillion strings, tie them end-to-end, lasso the Sun and pull!” grins Clive.
“But if you lassoed the Sun, you wouldn’t have caused the Black-Out on the Earth.”
“You might if they missed the Sun and got us instead.” Clive defends his initial ludicrous suggestion. “Anyway, the string would burn up in the Sun’s atmosphere; that’s several millions of degrees hot.”
“Sorry, guys,” says Ivan. “I’m going to have to duck out of this discussion, amusing and possibly productive though it is; there’s a Heads of Departments’ meeting in ten minutes. But I like what I’m hearing. None of these ideas is likely to bear fruit, let alone raspberries, but this is just what I’m looking for — each of you is picking up an idea from someone else and running with it. One day you may actually hit on the truth.
“See you tomorrow; have a good evening!”
“Cheers, Ivan, and thanks for the great lunch.”
They go back to analysing the aliens’ images.
Both images 19 and 20 have the same format, a list of words and symbols. This is the most difficult image yet.
“No diagrams!” says Clive. “They must think that us Earthlings are cleverer than we seem.”
“Too many assumptions there, Clive,” Louisa comments. By now we’re supposed to have worked out how their minds work and what all those symbols mean. They led us by hand with the earlier pictures and other stuff. Now we’ve got ten thousand years to work out what the remainder of it is all about.”
“I can’t wait that long,” says Anna. “I’m going home this weekend!”
“Lucky for some!”
First there is a series of symbols, sometimes only one, followed by a very large number that uses the exponentiation symbol, and which is marked in time units and seems to be increasing row by row. Then there’s a word or words and another large number with a length unit symbol. In some of the rows, the series of symbols are the same as in another row though the numbers are different.
“Well I plan to go through the images and see what all these numbers are. Then we might get an idea of what it’s all about,” Martin says. He takes a blank piece of paper and starts calculating what the time-unit and length-unit numbers are in base ten. Of course, he needs the computer to do the calculations for him, but he decides to write everything down on paper so that he can see if there’s any pattern. The others seem to be looking blankly at their computer screens. “Come on guys! We’re going to get another article in next Sunday’s Herald and Globe, and at this rate, mine will be the only by-line!”
“This green flash is a problem. There’s nothing in what we’ve found to give the slightest hint of what it means,” Anna remarks. “Seems like a suitable case for brainstorming and thinking outside the box to me.”
“I agree,” says Louisa. “Assad said oxygen has some prominent green lines in its spectrum, so that might be involved. They might even have a breathable atmosphere.”
“Copper has got a lot of compounds that are green, or greenish blue,” Clive notes. “But that green doesn’t look to me like any of those we checked out.”
Martin asks: “What did the Chemistry department make of Gert’s painting? I don’t think I was in on that discussion.”
Clive answers: “They were a bit mystified. All they could suggest was that it was some complicated mixture of copper-based chemicals. I think they were under some pressure on another project, so they didn’t really want to know, to be honest.”
“We’re like that sometimes. It’s only ever our own work that’s important,” Martin ruefully observes.
“We’re still in the box,” Anna points out. “Come on, guys! The aliens were mowing their lawns, ready for all that sunlight that will come streaming down in a year’s time. It doesn’t grow very fast in their weak light.”
“They were originally orbiting Proxima Centauri. What do we know about that star?” Louisa asks.
“Well, it’s a red dwarf star and most of its radiation is in the infra-red,” Clive consults his notes. “It has a lot of flares, like solar flares, which are in the X-ray part of the spectrum, and magnesium has been detected there. It has been suggested that there are no gas giant planets going round it, nor any brown dwarfs! Weird that?”
“Did any of the images indicate when they were torn away from Proxima? It could be that they were in fact orbiting Alpha Centauri A or B,” Anna asks.
“Yes, that’s a possibility because the orbits of those three stars are quite far apart, and when they come close at some stage, is it possible that their brown dwarf and its planets could be torn from them to Proxima and then torn away a second time by another star?” Louisa replies. “One of their diagrams mentions 50 million years.”
“A bit unlikely to be dragged away twice by other close encounters, but possible, I suppose,” concedes Anna. “Could their apparatus be contaminated with verdigris? If it’s made of copper or one of its alloys, brass or bronze?”
“I’d have thought that requires a fair amount of oxygen or water in their atmosphere,” Clive remarks.
“I read somewhere that water is a common component of brown dwarfs or something to do with them,” Anna adds, “but I’m not too clear on what it was. It’s a pity they didn’t tell us a bit more about themselves and their planet, like its atmospheric make-up.”
“You women are always talking about make-up!” Martin jokes.
“Balls! I thought we were here to do a bit of brainstorming, not throwing gratuitous insults about,” Anna complains.
“Yeah, cut it out,” Clive cuts in.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. No offence meant.”
“Apology accepted. Now can we get back to work?”
But the cooperative, fun atmosphere is destroyed, and after a few minutes of non-work they agree to break up for the day.
“I’ll buy you all a drink and a sandwich at the Roasted Duck,” Martin offers.
There is silence while the others await Anna’s response: “OK. Eight o’clock, then?”
“Great.” They all leave in a happier mood. “Has he come into some money too for that series of articles?” Louisa whispers to Anna.
It’s Tuesday morning and the four students resume trying to understand images 19 and 20 of the aliens’ transmissions.
They have already noted that it contains a long list which has length units and time units interspersed. They try to organise them into a form that makes sense. There is a certain regularity in how the data is presented. The start of each item consists of an unknown word or words followed by a time-unit symbol and a number, most of which Martin has already evaluated. Could it be the name of their next target star and the length of time before they ‘raid’ it for energy? Then comes a word or words and a large number with a length unit symbol. The length number is very large, typically several light-years, but the words are a mystery at this point. Could they be the distance to the target?
“That’s the symbol for our Sun,” Louisa points to the start of one of the lines.
Martin adds: “And the time is nearly 11,000 years, and the length unit is 1 light-year by our reckoning. The time is increasing as you go through the list.
“Hey, I’ve just thought; where are Tom’s versions of these images? If we’re right, the Sun should be right at the top of the list in his last version of image 19.”
Clive rustles through some papers. “Yes, here it is. And you’re right, the Sun is at the top and... just a moment while I check the time... Yes, there are just a couple of minutes to go! Those unknown words could be something about the star, like its luminosity or spectral type — how useful it is to them.”
Martin asks: “Is there a way we can work out what the other stars are? Their distances should be plus-or-minus a light year from us, unless it’s a star that’s moving fast. They must all be quite close to the solar system, I’d’ve thought, otherwise they’d have to wait so long for the energy to come spewing in.”
“That one, the first in line, must be Sirius. It’s so bright in our sky, it must be in theirs too. The distance is given as about 8 light years, and the time is very short. I suppose,” Anna adds, “that it’s quite distant, relatively speaking that they’ve put it at the top because there may be some others they want to raid in the mean time.”
From the bottom of the previous column
“Hang on a moment. I think we may be mixing up time and distance here. If it is Sirius, the distance would be right at around 8.6 light-years, but if the time is short, that may indicate when the electromagnetism is due to start being drawn off, or it could be their calculation of when it will get to them. What was the time in Tom’s data for the Sun?” Louisa asks.
“A couple of minutes; so it’s the time till the start of the energy being drawn off. Are there any other nearer stars that they might go for in the meantime? Like Alpha Centauri,” Clive suggests. “They must know quite a lot about that system — maybe it suits their appetite!”
Martin asks: “Is it Alpha Centauri A or B?”
“A, I think, comes near the top of the list; it’s slightly closer and also brighter. The next one looks like B, which would be logical; they are the nearest, except us of course.
“But there’s one before that pair. It’s at about ten light years; any ideas?”
“Procyon?” Louisa suggests. “It’s bright and at about that distance. And a couple more after those, at around ten or eleven light years.”
Anna suggests: “They could be some closer but dimmer stars, nevertheless useful to them.” She consults her notes: “Like Epsilon Indi or Tau Ceti? No, Epsilon Indi is itself a brown dwarf.”
Martin answers: “Who knows? What we need is the coordinate system that they are using; I’m sure that would be useful. The trouble is that constructing such a coordinate system would be quite a task. Nevertheless it would be a help in identifying these stars, and if one of them is raided soon, it would be interesting to see the effect. I was browsing through a book on Spherical Trigonometry a few weeks before the Black-Out ended; I thought it might be useful to know something about it as the sky appears as a sphere; the aliens have another sky-sphere, but it’s offset from ours. Anyway I couldn’t understand much of the book — it was all about ‘haversines’ and things like that; anyone heard of them? No? Well I could try asking someone in the Maths Department; do we know anyone there?
“I wonder what happens if a star is moving across the sky, or even towards or away from them.” Martin thinks aloud. “Do they hit it on the move and track it across the sky? Or do they just miss it completely?”
“The problem is that we have no idea of what technology they’re using. How do you suck energy from a star?” asks Anna.
“Come on, out of our boxes!” Clive exclaims. “Brainstorming time again. All insults banned. Any suggestion is welcome.”
Martin starts: “We know there are four fundamental forces of nature: Gravity is the weakest by far, and is an attractive force; Electromagnetism can be an attractive force, or can be repulsive, like two similar magnetic poles; the Weak force is involved in radioactivity; the Strong force is what holds atomic nuclei together. The last three were supposed to have been ‘unified’ just after the Big Bang; Gravity has caused a problem because it doesn’t fit in with Quantum Mechanics.
“I’ve got a feeling that gravity couldn’t work, as it is so weak. How could it be used to draw another form of energy from one place to another?”
“Gravity uses gravitons, or so I believe, to interact between massive objects,” says Louisa. “Could it be that there’s another member of the graviton family that can do that?”
“Is there any known connection between gravitons and other sub-atomic particles?” Anna asks.
Nobody knows.
Martin volunteers to try to establish whether anything is known about this. “Could there be a variant of gravity that is repulsive, rather than attractive? And there’s this supposed ‘dark energy’ stuff that nobody seems clear about, which is apparently causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate rather than slow down, which is what classical gravity is supposed to be doing. Could there be something in that?”
Nobody knows.
“I can’t see any way the Weak or Strong forces can be involved,” says Anna. “Their range is so small. How can either be responsible for sucking vast quantities of electromagnetic energy a whole light year — not to mention eight light years for Sirius — across space?”
There is no response from anyone, except a tacit agreement with Anna from everyone.
“So that just leaves Electromagnetism,” she continues. “And it’s that that’s being drawn across space. But how?”
“The answer must be something to do with electrons; that’s what they want, electrons not other things, to power their industry and homes, assuming they’re just a bit like us.” Martin again.
“They must also be taking protons or something else with a positive charge, or there’d be problems with the balance of charge,” Clive asserts. “Or positrons, maybe. But how?”
“I think we’re back to square one,” Louisa observes. Apart from Martin checking up on gravitons, we’ve got nowhere.”
They are all silent, and rather despondent for a moment.
Then Martin says: “We’ve been looking at forces. There’s one area we’ve been overlooking, which I mentioned just now and it was just an aside to something else, gravity, I think. What about Quantum Mechanics? Suppose, just suppose, that the aliens have found a way of exploiting the uncertainties that are involved there. No elementary sub-atomic particle is ever in a specific place, or if we know it is, where it is, then we’ve no idea where it’s going — remember Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?”
Clive picks up the point. “And if there was some way of harnessing this uncertainty, they might be able to pull electrically charged particles from here to there.”
“Yes, they wouldn’t need to identify an electron, say, and use their sucking machine to bring it to them; they could bring it into the right area, without ever knowing anything about how it got there,” Louisa adds. “As I understand it, the Uncertainty Principle is all about things being observed. There’s that famous two-slit experiment, where if you watch for a photon going through a specific slit, it will or it won’t, probability 1 or 0; do that lots of times and you get one pattern of images on a photographic plate on the far side of the emitter. But if you don’t watch, you get interference patterns on the film, because each photon goes through both slits, and when it comes together on the film, it interferes with itself!”
“So,” asks Anna. “If you send a signal to the Sun saying ‘Send me a zillion electrons but I won’t watch’, and the Sun can understand that request and act on it, the electrons come spewing out of the Sun and indeterminately wend their way to the aliens’ receiver.”
“In a nutshell, that could be it. The only problem is that we’ve got no idea how it could possibly be done,” adds Louisa. “What possible technology or science could they be using?”
Clive observes: “Nevertheless it seems the most promising idea so far. Assuming such a mechanism exists, it could account for why the power went off all over the world at the same time, and was restored everywhere simultaneously. Anywhere in the vicinity of the Sun would most likely get the signal at the same time and electrons from all over the world as well as the Sun would set off for Ursa Major.”
“Martin. You said a few days ago when we were in the early stages of going through the aliens’ images that they would probably tell us in the next one that E = mc2; but they didn’t,” says Anna.
“So?”
“So perhaps they don’t know about energy-mass conversion. They know about fusion reactions, but perhaps the connection between mass and energy is unknown...”
“Perhaps they don’t. Why do you make the point? But, hey, they know that hydrogen-to-helium conversion produces energy, they told us so.”
“Yes, but they may not know how much energy you can get; they’d have to be able to weigh the hydrogen and helium before and after and actually measure the energy in terms of the mass change. They are apparently surrounded by a cloud of dust including, no doubt, hydrogen gas. Instead of sucking energy from other stars, like the Sun, they could surely draw in an enormous mass of material locally from the dust cloud, and produce copious quantities of energy by fusion.”
“That’s a point,” Clive adds. “After all, they know about stellar nuclear fusion because they’ve told us so. I wonder: if they can produce this giant energy vacuum-cleaner, but they can’t manage to suck up some nearby material. If relativity hasn’t been discovered by them, they may not think the clouds of dust are anything more than a nuisance.”
“There’s something missing here,” Anna observes. “Could it be that although the energy-sucker is technically feasible, they can’t create a nuclear fusion plant?”
“But why not? It’s like building a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow when you can’t manage a Model T Ford,” says Clive.
Louisa notes: “We here on Earth haven’t managed it yet, only tiny amounts of fusion energy, while we need to input an enormous amount of ‘conventional’ energy to do the job. Maybe they’ve not discovered the secret either; maybe it really is possible only in a large generator, like a star. Maybe a fusion plant is the Rolls-Royce and the energy-sucker is the Model T.”
“Just thinking back,” Martin says. “We know that relativity and in particular gravity work on a large scale, especially since gravity is so feeble compared with the other forces of nature. We also know that quantum mechanics works on a small scale, but seems irrelevant on the large scale. Suppose they haven’t cottoned onto relativity, but they have done something about quantum theory on a large scale. It may turn out that their civilization isn’t quite as advanced in many ways as we first thought, but in other ways it is.”
“So does anyone have any idea what the green flash was?” Ivan asks three of the four post-graduates; Clive is busy doing something in his office.
“We had a brainstorming session on the subject but it didn’t get anywhere. Maybe it was just a switching off of the transmissions before their energy sucker started up,” Anna suggests. “Could be oxygen, copper, who knows?”
“Maybe, maybe. I must contact Harry and see if he has any ideas. He and Gert were the only ones to have seen it.”
“One thought though,” Louisa interposes. “You said that when you first looked at the brown dwarf, just after it first appeared, that it was a typical T-class one. Well one thing I read recently is that T-type dwarfs contain a lot of sodium and potassium which gives rise to absorption in the green part of the spectrum, so they’d actually look a magenta colour if we were up close to one, magenta and green being complementary colours. There could be an explanation of the green flash there. One other thing is that lithium is present in most brown dwarfs, so that could explain why one of the first images in their set was a picture of a lithium atom. Lithium burns quite fast in ordinary stars, so they use most of it up before they are very old. But brown dwarfs aren’t quite hot enough to burn it up so quickly, and the convection currents in the stars can make them appear to be quite rich in lithium.”
Clive suddenly bursts into the room, hardly able to construct a coherent sentence.
“English! Speak English! They speak English!” he cries. “They can speak English!”
Ivan, Anna, Martin and Louisa are stunned!
“Can you explain that?” Ivan asks.
Clive takes a deep breath. “Well, as you know, I’ve been monitoring the signals coming in from the aliens and recording them. A computer program converts them to the images we’ve seen, and also recognises any known words and numbers, which it converts to forms that we can understand. Every now and then I take a look at these new images, and they’ve all been the same sequence as before, except for a few details like counting down the time to the next raid on us and all the other stars. Just now I was scanning through the last few days’ worth of them when the sequence suddenly stopped. I thought we’d lost the signal or something, but then a new image appeared. It’s in English and reads: ‘Greeting to people of Earth planet We sorry if cause problem recently. Next transmission is ASCII code for you understand more easy and start in four minute’.”
“What happened then?” asks Martin.
“For four minutes they sent a continuous signal; then real words came in, which I could read straight onto my computer screen. Of course, I’ve recorded everything. The gist of it is that they have been scanning all local stars with the intention of replenishing their power supply by drawing some of it towards them. They have been scanning all these stars and trying to see if they have any planets with intelligent life on them and if so, they avoid them. They last looked at the Solar System two-hundred years ago and found no electromagnetic emissions. Of course, at that time there was no radio or anything for them to detect. So they went ahead and issued the instruction to draw power from the Sun this year; even though the Sun is so near, they were having trouble seeing through the cloud of dust and gas that keeps on hiding the Sun from them. Just after the point of no return, they saw through a clear break in the cloud of dust surrounding them that we were very actively transmitting radio signals — all our radio and TV stations, though the signals must have been weak and confused. They couldn’t stop the process of drawing off our energy, but they put their best linguists on looking at our transmissions, and found that we used many languages, but English was the most common.”
“Have they got an explanation of why they need this power?” Louisa asks.
“Nothing more than that their star is dying and is not powerful enough to support them. They repeat their sincere apology for any harm they may have caused. Apparently they ‘raided’ us three thousand years ago, but it didn’t matter then as we were still mostly in the stone age or whatever.”
“There were sophisticated societies in Greece, China, Egypt and so on...” Anna objects.
“Yes, but nobody had discovered electricity then, so it didn’t affect our ancestors.”
Ivan intervenes. “So to sum up. They didn’t know an intelligent race lived here, so they felt free to take energy from our Sun, which included planet Earth. Then they realised their mistake, stopped, and are apologising.”
“That’s about the size of it. They seem to call their planet or their race Yuom,” Clive says.
“Well, we’ve got plenty for next Sunday’s paper. I really think we should involve the government pretty soon, assuming they aren’t listening in to us right now. This is more than a national issue, too, so the UN will want to get involved. Even if we don’t make direct contact with them, they’ll know in less than a year that we were adversely affected. They must be monitoring our radio transmissions now that they know we’re here.”
“Meanwhile, Clive, keep listening, and thanks for being so alert.”
That afternoon Ivan gathers his research students into a small conference room. “You realise that Clive’s discovery alters everything quite a lot. Obviously we’ve got a fantastic story for next Sunday’s Herald and Globe, but we now really ought to hand the decisions over to the politicians. This story will hit the front pages all over the world. Suddenly you are all going to be interviewed on all the television news channels.
“Clive, can you print out everything the aliens have said in English?
“If possible, can you, Louisa and Martin work on the first images in their transmissions and try to fill in any gaps that we haven’t yet been able to decode?
“Anna, I’d like you to work with me on deciding the best way of handling the public relations side.
“Is everyone agreed on this approach? Speak now or forever hold your peace!” Silence indicates concurrence. “Now let’s all go back to our offices or, if you prefer, our digs, and think it all over. Tomorrow is Wednesday and I’d like us all to meet to share our conclusions. OK? My office at 9:30.”
By 9:28 on Wednesday morning, all five of them are gathered in Ivan’s office and proceed to a conference room.
“I’ve already taken one step; I’ve invited Ewan O’Donnell of the Press Association to meet us this afternoon, as he’s been promised the exclusive rights on our information, from the point of view of its publication. He’s asked if it’s OK for him to bring Assad with him, to help with the newspaper’s way of presenting this sort of article.”
“You mean they’ve published articles about real aliens before?” Martin mischievously asks.
Ivan ignores him. “I hope none of you has any objection to that?” The research students all murmur their agreement. “I’ll ring him and say that’s OK, then.”
“What about the Government?” Anna asks. “When do we involve them?”
Martin intervenes: “It’s not just the British Government that’s involved, or should be involved; it affects the whole world. Sounds to me that the United Nations should consider it.”
“I agree,” says Ivan. We provide the technical information, but we aren’t the ones to decide on the big decisions like whether we should start some sort of dialogue with the aliens. Clearly we’ve got until next October before they start receiving our post-Black-Out radio signals — that’s a year since power was restored. They are bound to be monitoring us and the politicians need to have decided on the approach to be made by then. Pretty soon afterwards, they will get our first reaction to their messages, which were reported worldwide, including the UN’s response.”
Martin adds: “I think we should publish our latest results in next Sunday’s paper, and then hand the decision-making over to the politicians.” There seems to be no objection to that strategy.
Ewan and Assad arrive just after lunch and are put into the full picture.
“I think your approach is right,” Ewan tells them after Ivan has told him their discoveries and proposals.
“We haven’t got very much time till the deadline for Sunday’s newspaper. And, by the way, we’ve got contracts also with the Australian Courier — that’s published in Sydney, the Washington Record, the Ontario News-Times, and I’m negotiating several others, including in French, German and Spanish. So that should increase your fee for the story.”
“It all sounds like good news to me!”
“Assad’s staying at The Royal Stag again.”
Assad is briefed by Ivan and the four research graduates; he starts planning out a set of stories, enough to fit some more full pages of The Sunday Herald and Globe.
On Thursday morning, Ewan phones Ivan to check on progress.
“Assad’s been a big help. I think you’ll have everything you need by tomorrow evening. All of us here are eager to see Sunday’s paper.”
On Friday morning, all six, Ivan, four students and Assad, meet in Ivan’s now cramped office, and decamp to a conference room.
“What progress have we had?” Ivan asks.
“The newspaper article is going well,” Assad replies. “We’d like some sort of summary from you, if you don’t mind, looking at the political aspects from a more mature angle, if you don’t mind.”
Ivan smiles: “You make me sound like some old...”
But Clive interrupts. “We’ve had some more from Yuom, in English. They say that they’re surprised that we live for less than a hundred years normally, and also that our population is over six billion. Their usual life-span is about eleven hundred years, and there are only ten thousand of them.”
“God, that’s a relief, if it’s true!” Ivan exclaims. “I’d hate to be faced by billions of savage aliens hungering for our energy. Can we get this into Sunday’s paper?”
“Yes, I’m sure we can, no problem,” Assad answers. “I hope you’ll find our articles most satisfactory, with your contribution too.”
And very happy they all were.
Take a look at the first four pages of The Sunday Herald and Globe, 19th December 2010
(PDF file)