The Plutonian

Jo-Zac Hanner had just started his job-orientation course. He was seventeen and had done quite well so far in his academic examinations and in his psychological and practical tests. One year remained before he could start his university course, and he had only to pass through the ordeal of doing an actual job of real work, or rather assisting others and watching them to do theirs.

He could have chosen to observe, even fight, in the war in Turkey between Europa and Islamia, he might have helped by caring for the sick and hungry in the dust-bowls of the Brasilian Desert, or he could have joined one of the research teams trying to find a cure for the Great Death virus. However, he chose instead to stay nearer at home and to work and study at the Astronomical Institute of North West Europa in Manchester. He had been interested in astronomy since his great-great-grandfather had given him a small antique, but still working, brass refractor telescope when he reached the age of ten.

He also had an interest in astrology, especially of ancient Greece. The mythological stories were absorbingly curious to him, and he found that reading his library of electrobooks was a pleasant diversion from the intense and logical scientific work that he was training for. Many of the myths were confusing and counter to any rational explanation, but he read them as some sort of science fiction, set in the past rather than the future where most of it was concentrated. Sometimes he reflected that these ancient tales were really no more bizarre than the stories of faster-than-light travel or worm-holes that allowed valiant humans to pass through into other universes.

“I can’t figure out what this data means,” Jo-Zac said to his work-experience supervisor, Loom Palma.

“Why? What’s the problem?” she asked. She was a rather stern and abrupt person, someone with whom Jo-Zac had little empathy. But she was his mentor, so he tried to do his best to overcome his dislike of her, even if she rarely reciprocated; he felt that his own attitude was morally superior to hers and that it should stand him in good stead in his future career, though he knew he had to be careful of appearing to be too arrogant.

“The automatic near-Earth monitoring system has identified a potential approach. The Near-Earth Object Scanner One identified an eclipse of two of the stars between the Pleiades and the Hyades, in the constellation Taurus...”

“Yes, I know where the Pleiades and Hyades are!” she snapped. She had no desire to be a mentor to anyone, especially this upstart of a schoolboy.

“...Kappa Tauri and 56 Tauri, and the transit was confirmed by two other Scanners, so it couldn’t have been a transient event or system aberration. Anyway I followed it up and calculated the ephemeris of the object. It appears to be on a trajectory that will touch the outer stratosphere of the Earth in about eleven days and ten hours time from now. And it’s moving at a very high speed.”

“Just the upper atmosphere?”

“Yes, as far as I can see, though a slight deviation could cause an impact.”

“Well, you did the right thing in bringing this to my attention. I’ll call the NEO centre with this information — I assume you haven’t done anything yet. Get me the latest, most accurate data you can. Any clue as to its size?”

“Small, less than twenty metres long by six wide, sort of egg-shaped. And its mass can’t be more than fifty tonnes.”

“Thanks. Looks like one worth reporting, but it should be no real problem.”

Jo-Zac went back to his computer. He felt a little proud at having done something useful for once and to have been acknowledged for it by Loom.

Two hours later he called on her again, this time with more urgency in his voice.

“There’s no change to the prognosis that the object will skim the Earth’s atmosphere,” he told her, “but I did a back-projection on its orbit, and it seems to have passed quite close to Mars only twenty days ago — yes, twenty days ago — which may be why it wasn’t detected before. The effect of the Martian pass-by was to alter its path quite significantly and the pass-by gave it one hell of a kick in our direction; and so far as I can compute, it was in the vicinity of the minor planetoid Pluto about nine years and seven months ago. In fact — or rather, in my opinion — there is a distinct possibility that it actually came from there.”

“So it’s a Kuiper belt object that got disturbed by the planetoid and entered the main part of the Solar System near that Pluto thing,” Loom postulated. “I assume you’ve checked all the standard catalogues for this item?”

“Yes, I have. No previous reports.”

That afternoon Loom called Jo-Zac to her office.

“I think you’ll be interested in this. It’s the latest on your NEO.” (What praise, indeed, to have her call it ‘his’ NEO, Jo-Zac thought, smiling to himself.) “It has changed its trajectory quite significantly. No, you needn’t worry; so far as I can see, your coordinates and other data contained no errors, within the realm of accuracy of the Scanners and the computer programs. Your conclusions were spot on.”

“What do you mean, it has changed its trajectory? How can that be? Maybe it passed close to another object, an asteroid or a comet?”

“No, nothing else was involved. It’s not a natural object at all. It has used thruster rockets to slow it down, and it shows every sign of preparing to go into orbit around the Earth, and possibly even landing!”

At that point Loom’s communicator buzzed. She listened in silence, but turned almost white as the person at the other end of the line gave her an update on Jo-Zac’s NEO. When she closed the line, she took a deep breath and passed the news on to her student. “Your interplanetary object has just been in voice, yes, voice communication with the NEO centre. It is some sort of manned craft and the communication was in English.”

“What? But there are no reports anywhere in the five-hundred years of manned space travel that mention a mission that went astray! How could it be? It must have been a secret space mission during the wars of the twenty-second century.”

“No, I don’t understand it either. But they say it’s definitely alien. Apparently the person — or creature — on board said that he or it intends no harm to us and comes in peace and wants to share its technology with ours. The NEO centre is keeping a line open to the creature, and will let us know of any further significant developments.”

And so it was that thirteen days later, a bright metallic rounded cylinder lowered itself by retro-rockets onto the spacecraft landing area by the NEO centre, buffeted by the seventy-five kilometre-per-hour gale that was usual at that time of year. A detachment of armed personnel quickly surrounded it, but did not seem to be required.

A few minutes later, a very tall man-like creature in a dark grey two-piece suit emerged from the craft and held both his hands open as a sign of friendship, and also showed that he carried no weapon. He was cautiously ushered into the main conference room of the centre, where Loom and Jo-Zac were among the audience curiously anxious to know who this ‘man’ was. After shaking hands with several dignitaries, elders and heads of departments of the NEO centre, the man sat rather awkwardly in a designated chair behind a table. The Head of the NEO centre bade him welcome, added that he was pleased that the man spoke English, and invited him to address the assembly.

The man stood for a moment, and then sat down, explaining that the Earth’s gravity was rather strange to him, and begged those assembled to hear him seated. Then he began his address:

“Citizens of the planet Earth. I bring you greetings from my planet of origin, which is a minor one now, but was once catalogued by the Earth’s astronomical community as a true planet. I refer to Pluto, which first came to your attention here on the planet Earth in 1930, over five hundred years ago.”

There were some gasps from the audience, from those who had heard of Pluto and could not believe that it could possibly support life, let alone life in human form. An orbiter had gone there several centuries ago, but reported nothing of interest, just a cratered but otherwise featureless mass of rock out in the farthest reaches of the Solar System. Even its largest moon, Charon, showed nothing of particular interest.

One man sitting near the back of the room called out: “This is some kind of come-on, isn’t it? Who are you trying to kid?”

“Hear him out,” said another, and the room turned in silence to their visitor.

“I understand your disbelief, but I hope over the next few days to explain myself and my reasons for being here. I left Pluto nearly ten of your years ago. I imagine that you have been tracking my progress for some months now at least.” A few embarrassed faces hinted to him that his voyage had only very recently been observed, but he continued. “My spacecraft, as I said, left Pluto ten years ago, though I remember little of the journey as I was transforming into what you see now, a being that fairly closely resembles yourselves.”

There were more gasps.

“About one Earth month ago, I passed the planet that you call ‘Mars’. I was a little too close to that planet for the ideal trajectory — remember that I had been in my transformation phase for much of those ten years and therefore had no opportunity to manage the trajectory of my spacecraft, but I was able to correct the path quickly to put it on a course to encounter the planet Earth. So I am here a little sooner than I had anticipated. Then I had to use my rockets to slow me down for entry into your atmosphere, and then land here, as you can now see.”

To Jo-Zac little of this was new, except for the bit about transforming himself into human form; and he was pleased at the confirmation that of his own suggestion that Pluto was the man’s origin.

At that point the Head of the NEO, Jai Ngplur, stood up and asked the man if he had the need of any refreshment, and if so, in what form.

“No thank you. I can get all I need from your rich atmosphere. I have no need for food. However, I shall have need for some rest in a short while, perhaps in half an hour. I shall need about one week’s rest to adapt myself, for as I just said, I am here slightly earlier than I had allowed for. Would you be so kind as to permit me that?”

“Why, of course,” Jai Ngplur replied. “Some quarters which we hope will be to your liking have been arranged already. We will, with your permission, continue for another fifteen minutes, and then we can discuss with you to ensure that all possible conditions are enabled for your rest.”

“Thank you. Perhaps I should explain the main purpose of my mission. Then after that, I am sure that while I am resting, you will want to look over my spacecraft, if you haven’t already started doing so. You will most likely also wish to examine me too. Please do so with my full permission. I only ask that anything you touch or dismantle on my spacecraft will not be damaged in any way, and that you do not use any invasive or radioactive processes on my body, so that I shall at some time in the future be able to return to Pluto, if that is necessary.”

That final ‘if’ puzzled Jo-Zac, but he was the only one who consciously registered it.

“My mission,” the man from Pluto continued, “is to try to gain more knowledge of your scientific developments. I also am quite prepared to share with you anything that may be of interest to you, and to answer any questions that you may have. I also have for you some information that you will need if you are to survive into the future, but more of that in due course; for the moment it can wait.”

What on Earth could that mean, many people wondered.

“For approximately five hundred years I have been monitoring the electronic signals that you have been sending out into space. I have some very efficient collectors of such signals. Your first coherent signals, due to the work of Mr. Marconi and others, was of the utmost interest and excitement to me, as I then realised that the Earth was a planet where intelligent life was still evolving, the only such body — other than my own — in our Solar System, so far as I could ascertain. A hundred of your years after your discovery of radio communication, I was overwhelmed with data from your information revolution; before that I had to content myself with relatively random radio and television broadcasts, which, though fascinating to me, were totally uncoordinated. With your invention of the internet, I could actively scan through huge data bases of information that billions of you — yes, at that time, as you are aware, there were billions — had made available to all.”

Why, Jo-Zac wondered, did the man always use ‘I’ and ‘me’ rather than ‘we’?

Several people shuffled in their seats at the reminder of the almost complete annihilation of the human race that had happened during the wars of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries and the genetic madness, the Great Death, of the twenty-third century.

In the former, the changes in the Earth’s climate had obliterated millions in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, and had generated intense competition between nations for scarce resources, resulting in wars that encompassed the globe. The total population of Africa had been wiped out, apart from a few isolated tribes. Much of southern and eastern Asia, despite its rapid industrialisation in the twenty-first century, had suffered a similar fate. Once-great countries like Russia and its dependencies were set back almost to the stone age. South America lost its essential forests and its people were having left to scratch a living from the meagre soil that remained. The once great Amazon river was nothing more than a stream, and disappeared in many places where the water had formed brackish lakes that had dried up.

In the so-called genetic revolution, the remaining scientists had experimented with extensive genetic modifications of crops, based on incomplete and inadequate testing, to try to increase yields to feed the survivors. The promise of genetically modified crops had initially given great hope to the remaining mankind, but when random self-modifications had rendered crops sterile, there was nothing to fall back on. The result had been the near elimination of them all and the extinction of nearly ninety per cent of the animal species that were left. North America was barren where it had once been the bread-basket of the world.

Only Europa and Australasia had survived more or less intact, though their populations had been reduced by three-quarters of what they were in the year 2000.

The man continued, “I considered transmitting a message of greeting to you, but initially I was uncertain of your reaction. I learned of so many conflicts and wars throughout your history that I was nervous. Perhaps in the course of our discussions in coming weeks, you could explain to me why your species is so belligerent. This is something that I have pondered for many years, and I have found only odd theories in your internet documents, so I am really none the wiser on this strange phenomenon. Now the time has come when I must trust you, and I hope you will trust me, for the lack of trust seems a common thread throughout your history. However, now — or rather several of your decades ago — I became aware of something that would make our cooperation imperative if you and I are to survive.”

“If I may interrupt,” said Zoom Palma. “You refer to events that took place some centuries ago; may I ask how old you are? And do you have a name? What may we call you?”

He ignored the first part of Loom’s question. “I’m sorry. I had overlooked the fact that names are important to human beings. Please call me... Krios. Now, with your permission, I would like to take my period of rest,” he continued. “There are many things that we must discuss, but later...”; and with that he was led to his quarters.

There’s something odd going on, Jo-Zac thought to himself. From somewhere in his memory he recalled that name, Krios, or Chrios, or Crius, but where? Why had the alien hesitated before giving his name? And why hadn’t he answered the question about his age?

For seven days technicians and scientists pored over the alien spacecraft. It was nuclear-powered, but did not appear to show any advances over the Earth’s own craft of several hundred years ago. Nor were its computer and communication systems significantly different from those in use on the Earth many decades, even centuries ago, though the communication system was rather more sensitive, and it appeared to be emitting a very weak signal directed at Pluto, no doubt reporting on the physical conditions on this alien planet. The scientists also attached monitors to Krios’s body, but registered nothing except a very low-level electrical activity that occurred at many places in him. They also found nothing about him like human or animal DNA; his body seemed to consist of long carbon-based chains of chemicals, with a predominance of nitrogen and hydrogen, some sulphur, potassium and silicon but with relatively little oxygen.

None of this caused much surprise, interesting as it was.

What was unexpected was the abruptness with which Krios woke up: one moment he was apparently fast asleep, showing no signs different from those of the past week on the monitoring probes attached to him; a second later he was alert and asking for the probes to be removed, if his hosts would be so kind.

The conference quickly resumed and the alien said he would continue with his account, and would at any time be most willing to answer any questions that the audience might have.

“I thank you,” Krios said, “for not causing any damage to my spacecraft during your examination of it. For this I am very grateful. Equally for my own self. To me it indicates that my reliance on trusting you was probably not misplaced. Thank you once again.”

How on earth did he know all that and that his craft was OK, wondered Jo-Zac as did many others.

“I said when I last spoke to you that I had learned much from your extensive data bases of information on all sorts of subjects. It took me some time to decode the information, and it was only after much thought that I realised that it was written in several of what you call ‘languages’. Later I managed to learn several, though why you need so many now mystified me until I used them to learn more about the history of your planet in the last several thousand years. It seemed to me that what you call ‘English’ has been the most widely used, though, I hope you will agree with me that it is not the easiest — that is, I beg you, my impression and is not intended to be any kind of insult to those of you for whom English is the natural language. I believe your language was derived from Latin and earlier from Greek, though it seems to have many words that are interlopers.

“One thing has troubled me, sir,” Jo-Zac interrupted. “Why do you always use the singular form ‘I’, rather than the plural ‘we’ when you refer to your discoveries and investigations?”

“A good question, young man. I have no need for any language — consider this: when a flower begins to open, does it need a language to communicate from one part to another? No. Each cell of the flower performs its function as required by the circumstances in which it is, from a rain shower falling on it or the warmth of the sun on its petals. These influences, and for higher beings their observations, automatically produce electrical or chemical reactions which influence the rest of the being in some way.

“But your question comes from a being who is not solitary, who has no way of performing its functions without the use of some kind of language be it spoken, written, or made by gestures of one sort or another. Your most primitive mammals, fish and birds all have language of some sort, and your insects, ants for example, are all individuals who communicate with each other. In the case of ants it is, I understand, a chemical language, not one of words, and with bees, a dance.

“I communicate with other parts of myself by a method that was discovered many years ago by your quantum scientists. What you see before you now is but one very small part of my entire being; I share my elementary particles with other parts of myself, such as those that are on Pluto. As a result, if anything happens here to me, another part of myself is quickly aware of it there.

“Having said that, I have an extensive understanding of your most important languages, from Sanskrit, Greek and Latin and your civilisations through history; but that’s another story.”

“But are you implying that you have no need to communicate with others of your species?” Loom asked.

“No, madam. For I am unique.”

“Eventually, as I said, I learned much about your science and technology. It was often almost irresistible to me to contact you to explain why some theory that you had developed was wrong, or why your interpretation of scientific data contained some erroneous assumptions.

“The reason for my reticence, as I have said, was your belligerent past. This reason gave me great concern and, as I will relate to you later, it caused a most dramatic change in my life.

“The problem arose when I realised what path you were taking at the end of the twenty-first century. It was then that your society, in an attempt to overcome the ravages of hunger and chronic poverty, which had until then been relatively well contained, began to affect many billions of your people. Much of this was due to your over-population and to the warming and other climatic changes that your ancestors had caused to your atmosphere. After many wars that decimated your population, whole species of animals became extinct, and those that hadn’t were farmed so intensively that their natural beings became distorted, transmuted in a horrible fashion. The same happened to your plants, where great blights and failure of the natural and artificial irrigation caused many crops to fail year after year. You might have recovered, but the twelve billion of you alive at the beginning of the twenty-second century turned first to war and then in desperation to mass genetic modification. I could see that you were so badly onto the wrong path; I wanted so much to assist you; but your belligerence towards one another, which had intensified so much, despite your admittedly noble collective decision never to use nuclear weapons — which even your ancestors had seen as being a disastrous approach to any problem — made me so reticent about revealing myself to you, even though I knew your course was likely to be as flawed as nuclear war would have been.

“As you all know from your history studies, your desperate attempts to control genetics led to the Great Death of the twenty-third century. Since then, with all but a few hundred thousand people having been wiped out, human breeding has been strictly controlled to ensure that the deadly viruses that had been created and for which there was and still is no known cure could never be passed on.”

“Why were you so certain that our genetics technology was following the wrong path?” a woman near the back of the room asked.

“Because I have learnt and mastered the genetic code of life, and indeed I can use it at will. Your approaches to the science were and still are quite simply disastrous. Mine are such that I can present myself to you today in a form that you can recognise and almost accept as the same as yours. On my ten-year journey here, as I said before, I carefully modified myself into a form that you can accept as a man. My period of rest from which I have just emerged was a final adjustment to your local conditions.”

“Are you saying that you are rather like a caterpillar that has transformed into a butterfly?” the woman enquired.

“An interesting comparison. It will serve for the moment. Yes, the process is analogous, though vastly different in its detail. My ‘chrysalis’, as you might call it, can turn itself into any form that I wish. In due course I will supply you with indications that I hope will help you overcome these inadequacies in your scientific approach to the subject of genetic engineering. That, as I said, was one of the main reasons for my deciding to come to the planet Earth at this time, though my decision was rather forced upon me by a discovery only recently made and confirmed by me.”

Jo-Zac went back to his office when the Plutonian stopped for the day. The man had not really given any more useful information in that session, but had rather rambled on about his observations of life on Earth over the past several thousand years, much of which he admitted he had gathered from communications systems used in the past half-millennium. The young student wondered to himself what the recent discovery was. It seemed that it was not related to genetics, unless the man had some dramatic new information on the subject, which seemed unlikely. Then he remembered his initial reaction on hearing the man’s name, Krios. He went to his computer and searched for information on that name. The result rather startled him, and thinking it through kept him awake for most of the night.

 
 
Continued at the top of the next column

 
From the bottom of the previous column
 

“I have found,” the alien continued at the start of the next session, coming quickly to the main point, “that your planet, the Earth, is in very serious danger of being struck by a planetoid about fifty-five kilometres in diameter, though my observations show that it is not completely spherical. It is currently on the edge of what you call the Solar System, if there can be considered such a boundary, but it is approaching. I shall in a moment give you its precise coordinates and other information about it so that you may confirm the truth of what I am saying. I believe it to be just within the limits of your most sensitive Earth-bound telescopes and scanners, though if you still had the space-borne satellites and observation units of several centuries ago you would have no difficulty in finding it.” He reflected, “Your own Hubble and Webb telescopes in space were absolutely marvellous!”

So this was the news the alien wanted to share with the inhabitants of planet Earth.

“Despite my advanced knowledge of many things scientific, my engineering capability is limited, and I am unable to construct a missile that is able to divert the planetoid from its trajectory sufficiently to be sure that it avoids collision with your planet. However I do have the ability to assist you with resurrecting one of the ion-powered spacecraft that your ancestors built in the twenty-first century. If we can agree to implement such a course in the near future, your planet can be saved.”

“When do you expect this planetoid to reach us?” asked a wise-looking old man from the front row, one who Jo-Zac recognised as an elder of the Near Earth Object Astronomical Institute, a man of great renown.

“In approximately seventeen years from now, I believe, according to the characteristics of its trajectory. I am sure you will want to confirm them yourselves. However, I estimate that the likelihood of a collision with the Earth is greater than thirty-five per cent, such is the accuracy of the data.”

He proceeded to give details of the orbit being followed by the object and its mass. When he had finished, Loom leaned across to Jo-Zac and told him to check the figures out. “I will keep you informed of any further information this person gives,” she added.

Jo-Zac quietly left the conference room and went back to his office. He entered the data supplied by the alien and waited for the computer to process it. After a few seconds, a result appeared on the screen:

Probability of Impact of Object with Earth: 0.043%;
Confidence Level: 90%.

But that’s impossible, thought Jo-Zac, unless the alien’s data was wrong. He checked that he hadn’t made an error in entering the data, but it seemed fine. He decided to introduce some variations into the calculation. What if each of the elements of data was in error by, say, one per cent? This time, the result was even lower. By a tenth of one per cent? It was insignificant again.

He tried a different tack; he instructed the computer to show him a visualisation of the object’s path, introducing slight random uncertainties into its motion. He remembered that he had originally assumed Krios’s spacecraft to be a natural object. By introducing these irregularities, he was mimicking the course adjustments of a controlled spaceship, in case that was what it was.

The computer took much longer this time, but gradually a picture built up on the screen. This picture of the object’s path gradually fanned out, as the irregularities in the data meant that its postulated path was less and less certain as time progressed. The object passed within the orbits of Pluto, Neptune and Uranus, and, as Jo-Zac could anticipate from the screen, it seemed to be approaching Saturn. He zoomed in on this part of the orbit and found that it just missed the satellite Titan. The object continued on its way, its path perturbed by the close approach to the Saturnian system, and passed well within the orbits of Jupiter and Mars before nearing the Earth. Excitedly, Jo-Zac zoomed in on this part, but found that the object should approach no nearer than the Moon even given the most pessimistic interpretation of the influence of Saturn and its satellites.

He was puzzled. He thought for a few minutes, and then tried using the original data without any variations, and seeing where that led. The graphic image once again showed the object entering the solar system, passing well away from the outermost planets, but still nearing Saturn. Again, he zoomed in, and was astonished to find that it appeared to smash straight into Titan. He stopped the simulation there and asked the computer for the result in statistical form.

Probability of Impact of Object with Titan: 78.179%;
Confidence Level: 90%.

In other words, the object was much more likely than not to collide with the satellite Titan. In the unlikely event that it missed, there was then a very low probability of it hitting the Earth — that was the 0.043%.

But why was Krios so concerned about Earth if the planetoid was very likely to hit Titan?

Suddenly it all clicked. Jo-Zac picked up one of his electrobooks, transferred the vital results from his computer to it, and dashed back to the conference room.

He found Loom outside, there being a break in the proceedings.

“Nothing much of interest while you were away,” she told him.

“I’ve found out a lot!” Jo-Zac exclaimed. I’ve got to ask him some very important questions to confirm it all. Is that OK?”

“It’s OK by me. But you’d better clear it with the elders of the Institute if it’s that vital.”

“Believe me it is!”

He found the white-haired elder who had earlier asked a question and Jai Ngplur, and was granted permission to interrogate the alien, while naturally he was to remember that Krios was their guest and should be treated in an appropriate manner.

Ten minutes later the proceedings resumed, with Jo-Zac sitting alongside the elder instead of near the back of the room. The elder stood up and spoke to the alien.

“Sir, I have beside me a young man who wishes to ask you some important questions before we continue with your explanation of your visit here. Is that acceptable to you?”

“Why yes,” Krios replied. “I will do my best to answer them. Please ask your questions, young man.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jo-Zac. “I am very obliged to you to grant me this permission.

“My first question concerns the planetoid that you said is on a collision course with the Earth. How accurate do you believe your coordinates are?”

“Very accurate. I have been observing the planetoid for over thirty of your years, and I am satisfied that the data that I gave you is accurate, with an error of less than one part in a million; that applies to its position, its motion and its mass.”

“Thank you, sir. Have you taken into account the possibility of its path being altered by another astronomical body, for example, a comet, another planetoid or an asteroid... or anything else like a planet or a planet’s satellite?”

“I have taken that into account, and I have found no other object that might perturb its orbit sufficiently. I must tell you that I have carried out extensive searches of all objects within reach of my instruments that might conceivably corrupt the data in any way.”

“Do you believe that this planetoid is a rocky body, solid like the components of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Or could it be a comet from the Oort belt, one that until now has never approached the inner Solar System?”

“Its composition is not known to me. However, the size has been calculated by me from the occultations the object has made with other bodies, stars and the like, and its movement in the thirty years of observation is consistent with it being a single solid body. I do not believe it to be from the Oort belt*. Of course, you must realise that there are very few objects in that part of space, so any gravitational effects are extremely small; the object is at the moment so far away that it barely feels the gravity of the sun*. Nor, before you ask, do I believe that it is some kind of spacecraft.”

“Have you ever visited the Earth before, sir?”

There was a stunned silence. What was this boy up to, asking such a question? His job was to analyze data associated with any objects that might potentially threaten the Earth, objects like the asteroid that had struck the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago and had preempted the extinction of the dinosaurs, or those that had been recorded more recently — in 1908 in Siberia or 2293 in Auckland, New Zealand.

“Perhaps you came here several thousand years ago,” Jo-Zac suggested. “Perhaps to ancient Greece? I noticed that you failed to answer the question about how old you are when it was asked once before,” and he turned to look at Loom.

Krios hesitated, and clearly was not expecting this line of questioning.

But Jo-Zac continued: “May I suggest, sir, that although you said that you are unique, you once weren’t, and perhaps still aren’t? Were your parents known to us here on Earth once as Uranus and Gaia? And did you and your wife Eurybia have three children Astraeus, Pallas and Perses? And did you once take on the form of a ram and were you associated by the ancient Greeks with the constellation Aries?”

Krios was led by the arm to his quarters. He had been shocked by Jo-Zac’s so unexpected questions and appeared not to know what to do or say. He had slumped into his chair and gone into some sort of coma, though he still seemed able to walk when aided.

Loom Palma, Jai Ngplur and the elder took Jo-Zac to a small side-room where they sat. The old man started questioning the student.

“Why did you ask him those odd questions? And why did they affect him so? I’d like some frank answers, please, Jo-Zac.”

“Yes sir, I owe you a proper explanation, of course. I am very sorry that I didn’t discuss these things beforehand with you, but I was concerned that you would treat me as a silly schoolboy with crazy fantasies, and I was so sure that I was onto the right track that I couldn’t take the risk. Please accept my apologies. At least his reaction was some sort of proof that I’m on the right track. I’m sorry.”

Jai Ngplur told him to continue.

“Well I’ll start from my first suspicions about the alien. He said that he had spent several years on the journey from Pluto and that he had been transforming himself into human form. So he obviously had some very strange powers. His story about coming from Pluto certainly agrees with our observations of his spacecraft’s trajectory. But I was rather dubious about the whole Pluto business because it is so inhospitable there. I found on the internet that a spacecraft had been sent there in the early twenty-first century, but had found nothing of interest; no atmosphere and bitterly cold, a few degrees above absolute zero. The same for its satellite system. Nothing has gone there from Earth since then; it is thought to be a totally dead planetoid, of no possible value, probably not even a useful source of minerals.

“Then he said something about going back to Pluto if it was necessary. If Pluto was his home, surely he’d want to go back there. So maybe, I wondered, he wasn’t from there. Or he could be the vanguard for some alien invasion force — but that is not my theory, it’s more in line with science fiction thrillers, which don’t particularly appeal to me.

“Then there was the question about his age, which he avoided answering, though he did say he’d been monitoring the Earth for at least five hundred years, so he was obviously pretty old by our standards. And later he showed quite a decent knowledge of our history and mythology back several thousand years. Of course he could have gathered that from our own internet sources.

“The next thing that puzzled me was why he always used the word ‘I’, not ‘we’. He said that he was unique which presumably meant that his species had died out or all been killed...” Jo-Zac paused for dramatic effect; Loom nodded her agreement with those possibilities. “Or perhaps he had been exiled from his place of origin. And when you, Loom, asked what his name was, he was a bit hesitant in pulling the name ‘Krios’ from his mind.”

“Yes,” Loom acknowledged. “But if he had been alone for so long, he mightn’t even remember his own name. Or if he really was unique, he wouldn’t have or need a name, he was just ‘me’.”

“True,” Jo-Zac agreed. “But he did come up with a name, and it was one which rang a bell in the back of my memory. A year or two ago, I read a bit about ancient Greek mythology. I don’t know why; I guess I was getting bored with continually having science pumped into my head. More recently I have been studying Roman mythology and Norse myths, and ancient and more recent religions like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and some others.”

Jo-Zac quickly switched to another line of thinking. “Anyway,” he said. “Later he gave us the orbital parameters of the planetoid he said was coming towards the Earth. I calculated its path and found that although it could approach the Earth, the likelihood of a hit was less than one in two thousand, with ninety per cent likelihood of that being correct. If he was as concerned as he said he was about the future of the Earth, that sort of chance was almost nothing — we’ve had worse scares and even worse hits than that in recent centuries. And he’d said he’d been anxious about coming here because we weren’t nice people to mix with — sorry, my words.

“But what I did discover about the object that he supplied coordinates for was that it is very likely to hit the satellite Titan that orbits Saturn. Nearly eighty per cent likely, and that’s high! So maybe he wanted us to use our technology to save Titan, not the Earth. He had to say it was for us, to get us on board his plan.”

Loom observed, “Surely he’d realize that we would check out his data and discover the truth?”

“I must admit that is a puzzle. Perhaps he hopes that our observational technology isn’t quite as advanced as that, but also he has a more important thing to worry about.”

“But why would he be so concerned about Titan?” the elder asked.

“Exactly!” said Jo-Zac excitedly. “Because that’s his real home!”

“How do you know? Why do you suspect that? When probes were sent there in the twenty-first century they found nothing but methane and ethane lakes, and no forms of life, even when they sent submarines into the deep organic seas.”

“Because ‘Krios’ was one of the Titan gods from Greek mythology! He apparently conspired with his brothers to castrate his father, but later was banished, my guess is to Pluto. That could explain his solitariness, why he said he was unique; perhaps the others were killed on the Earth after he’d been banished. His concerns over our warmongering possibly meant that he was basically a pacificist and only reluctantly participated in the horrific activities described in mythology. Maybe those gods weren’t as mythical as we’ve believed all these years. And the unmanned probes that went to Titan could easily have missed seeing a totally alien life-form, assuming that the others got back there or there were others remaining while Krios and his fellow-beings were away.”

“And the ram?”

“The god Krios adopted the form of a ram, according to the Greeks. And we have it on his word that he can transform himself from one shape into another.”

“What more do you know about these mythical beings?” Loom asked.

Jo-Zac consulted his electrobook. “Forgive me if I refer to my notes as the details are rather complicated and I can’t remember all the names.

“I’ll start with Uranus who was the god of the Sky, and Gaia who was the Earth. They were the parents of the Titans, among others. Krios was one of the Titan gods, and four of the brothers represented the pillars separating heaven and earth. Krios was the Titan of the south pillar, while his brothers Koios, Iapetos, and Hyperion were gods of the north, east and west pillars. There were about a dozen Titans altogether. Krios is the Ram or a personification of the constellation Aries. His wife was Eurybia and they had three children Astraeus, Pallas and Perses.

“According to the great Greek epic Theogony written by Hesiod in the eighth century B.C.,” and here Jo-Zac read from his electrobook:

“‘Gaia lay with Uranus and bore deep-swirling Okeanos, Koios, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, gold-crowned Phoibe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Kronos the Wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire. Uranus hid them all — and the Hekatonkheires and Kyklopes, brothers of the Titans — away in a secret place within Gaia, the Earth, as soon as each was born, and would not let them come up into the light. Uranus rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Gaia groaned within, straining, and she made an element of grey flint’ — some records say it was an adamant or diamond,” Jo-Zac explained — “‘and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons, these six Titans. She spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart: “My children, begotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing these shameful things.” But fear seized them all and none of them uttered a word until great Kronos the Wily took courage and answered his dear mother: “Mother, I will undertake to do this deed.”

“‘And vast Gaia rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot.

“‘And Uranus came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Gaia spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him...

“‘These sons who Uranus called Titans — which means Strainers — in reproach, for he said that they strained and did presumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards.’

“Hesiod,” Jo-Zac explained, “says that all six brothers were involved in the ambush and castration of Uranus, five straining to hold him, while the sixth, Kronos, cut off his genitals.”

“What a charming story!” Loom observed.

“The ruler of the Titans was Kronus,” Jo-Zac continued, “who was overthrown by his son Zeus, the Olympian. Most of the Titans fought with Kronus against Zeus and were punished by being banished to the pit of Tartarus, described as a void lying beneath the foundations of the cosmos, where earth, sea and sky all have their roots. Here the Titans shifted in cosmological terms from being holders of heaven to bearers of the entire cosmos. They were eventually released from the pit through the clemency of Zeus.

“Each one of them was the discover of things of benefit to mankind, and because of the benefit they conferred they were accorded honours and everlasting fame.”

The next day a small group of people from the NEO Institute held an interesting meeting with Krios, who had recovered his composure and said that he was willing to ‘come clean’, though those were Jo-Zac’s words, not his.

“You are correct, young man,” Krios said. “I and my brothers came from the satellite Titan of the great ringed planet Saturn. When I use the term ‘brothers’ do not take me literally, as we have no relationships like yourselves. We evolved there for many millions of years in the organic lakes that you discovered five hundred years ago. But much before your visits we developed the ability to transform ourselves into almost any form we wanted. We also gradually developed a technology that permitted us to study our universe from outposts on Titan’s surface and later from some of the other Saturnian satellites that had no atmospheres to obscure our observations. Then eventually we suspected that there might be a life form on your planet, the Earth. It took us a long time to create the technology to travel through space.

“Then some five thousand of your years ago we came here, landing in a remote part of what you call Makedonia. We observed your race secretly and discovered that most humans worshipped ‘gods’ which they imbued with magical or supernatural powers. So we presented ourselves in a form that was recognisable as human, but with changes that would make us appear god-like, and some of us were given the collective term ‘Titans’. We weaved the tales that you, Jo-Zac, have apparently read about and we associated ourselves with stellar constellations and other weird concepts. Your gullible predecessors believed it all, mostly because of your strange need to believe in something outside of yourselves. We even fought the battles that your ancestors seemed to think gods should do.

“Unfortunately, we quarrelled amongst ourselves, and some of the stories of mutilation and warring are more or less true. The only thing of significance that I would add is that because our basic chemical and biological properties are so different from yours, the ill-effects on us were merely superficial; nevertheless they were impressive to you, and the memories of us were passed from generation to generation of humans long after we left, first by word of mouth and later as recorded by your great writers like Aeschylus, Homer and Hesiod, or so I understand from your own records.

“After several hundred years we became bored with this game and all my brothers returned to our home on the satellite Titan. I alone remained on Earth to monitor your progress until your wars became so violent that I was obliged to leave; that was in the year 1658 by your reckoning. Unfortunately my brothers did not agree with my decision to leave the Earth at that time so I was banished to the planetoid Pluto, where I continued to monitor your evolution from afar. Most of the rest I have already disclosed to you. Incidentally, it was I who suggested to Christian Huygens in 1655 that he named Saturn’s largest moon ‘Titan’ — I had, by then transformed myself into human form — and I thought that might be a fitting memorial to my race.”

“But why,” Jai Ngplur interrupted, “didn’t we discover your race on Titan when we sent our spacecraft with their most sensitive sensors back in the 21^st century?”

“Because we simply hid ourselves from you. You were searching for biological life forms that resembled yourselves, so your instruments were totally ineffective in finding us or even traces of our existence.”

Five years later, an ion-propelled spacecraft left the Earth and rendezvoused several years later with the threatening planetoid; under the guidance of calculations by a team headed by Assistant Chief Scientist Jo-Zac Hanner, the spacecraft gently nudged the object out of the way of danger, so that it just avoided contact with Titan and veered harmlessly on a path that took it past the Earth, round the sun and back out into the Kuiper belt.

And Krios departed from the Earth in his own spaceship, called at Pluto to collect the remainder of his own self, and returned to glory as a hero of the satellite Titan, where he resumed living with his brothers and sisters, the other Titans, for many thousands of years.

---

* Krios said, in answer to a question from Jo-Zac, that “there are very few objects in [the Oort belt]”. Firstly, the Oort Cloud is believed to be spherical rather than a “belt”. Secondly, there are believed to be up to a trillion (10¹²) objects in the Oort Cloud; however it is so large, with a volume of up to a light year in radius, that it is true to say that objects in it are very unlikely to affect one another gravitationally.