by S.L. Nickerson
* * * *
The best—and worst—parts of research are surprises.
I had instructed him to only wake me up for a hot Jupiter, and even then it had to be a real sizzler.
The phone rang at eleven a.m. and into it I managed to grumble a single syllable: “Yeah?”
“Your spectra were perfect.” The happiness in Shakir’s voice sickened me. No one should be happy at this early hour. “I’ve been analyzing your old observations myself and discovered more exoplanets.”
“How big are they?”
“Rocky, Earth-sized, pairs at a time...”
“What’d I tell you? First, it must be around the size of Jupiter,” I said, speaking as I would to a child, “and then it has to be close to its sun. That makes it a hot Jupiter. Everything else, I don’t want to hear about.”
“But every team from here to Beijing is scrambling to find extrasolar Earths. More ESEs, they cry!”
“Yeah, everyone’s doing it. I have six months to finish my thesis and stand out enough to land a postdoc. How am I supposed to do that ogling bloody ESEs?”
“Even Wertzberg is, and you know how it is to get the Germans to—”
“Great. You’ve still got two years left. Go away.”
I was more pleasant by afternoon, probably because of Shakir’s unconscious state. When I wheeled my bike into our office at four p.m. he was face down on his keyboard, while at her desk in the corner, our other officemate, Ingrid, played chess with the incrediblecomputer.
Suddenly, Ingrid turned to me. “This is an event.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her, hanging up my helmet and unwinding the scarf that had protected my lungs from Toronto’s pollution. It was easy to be paranoid when sitting next to an atmospheric physicist like her all day.
“This is the first time you two’ve been in the same room for a very long while. Everyone was starting to think that you and Shakir had merged into the same person.”
I was not sure how to respond to that, and so instead I grunted. “Almost done for the day?”
“Yep,” she said. Ingrid was a theorist, most of her work being in the fictional realm that took place somewhere inside of a computer.
I plopped down into my seat to prod my computer from its slumber. “What job are you on now?”
“I’m tweaking a new model of Earth’s atmosphere, fixing our pollution rates to be constant with contemporary values and running it a few hundred timesteps into the future.” The theorists always remotely logged onto the incrediblecomputer, a machine I had never seen. None of their clique would divulge its location. It could have been shoved away in a closet in Iqaluit for all I knew.
“Crystal ball physics, then,” I said. “The future never gets old.”
“But it’s a slow day on the incrediblecomputer,” she added. “Damn cosmologists with their space-curvature calculations. They’re such resource hogs.”
My computer wakened, I logged on, and the first thing that greeted me was the giant doomsday clock, red letters flashing across my desktop. It was counting down to when the Behemoth Space Telescope—BST, informally referred to as “Beast”—would be operational. Ten days, four hours, sixteen minutes, and five seconds. With a mirror large enough to satisfy the combined vanities of all the celebrities in Hollywood and Bollywood, the BST was to fill the void felt in infrared astronomy since the James Webb Space Telescope got put down. It was calculated that the BST would be good enough to directly resolve the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by an exoplanet. The only problem with it was that the gatekeepers who controlled it, deciding in advance which astronomers would be able to use the BST, had rejected all my proposals for observational runs on it.
To further my study of hot Jupiters I needed a spectrum that only the BST could provide. Electromagnetic radiation of a source could be represented as a plot of intensity versus wavelength of radiation, called a blackbody spectrum. An ideal blackbody spectrum was smooth and hill-shaped. Our sun peaked in the visual, and Earth, being cooler, peaked in the infrared. Because stars and planets were not perfect, their blackbody “hills” had chunks eaten out of them from molecules in their atmospheres that had absorbed radiation at particular wavelengths. From such spectra, one could piece together the composition of the object’s atmosphere.
“Fuck,” I said after checking my email.
Ingrid raised a brow.
“Sydney and Cape Town have just rejected my applications. There goes them. What am I going to do if I don’t land a postdoc?”
“Get a real job.” She shrugged.
I returned a glare.
For the next while I typed away at a paper I was supposed to write last week on my newest hot Jupiter discovery, and every few minutes I switched back to my desktop to stare at the doomsday clock as if expecting it to go faster. If I got time on the BST, I could point at my postdoc of choice. I scanned the new papers online at arXiv, wrestled with the office printer, made some coffee, and typed a bit more of my paper.
By six p.m. Shakir stirred, peered around the office as if he did not know where he was, blinked, and then saw me. “Did you look at them?” he demanded.
“Look at what?” I asked.
“The spectra, the radial velocities, my calculations.”
“There’s an eraser stuck to your forehead.”
He groped at it. “Did you check them over?”
“No. How could I, when you didn’t give them to me?”
“I put the printouts on your desk.”
I eyed the stack of papers for the first time and discreetly pulled a folder over it. “Didn’t see them.”
“I suppose you did that too when you first analyzed the spectra. Kept the hot Jupiter and discarded the rest.”
“Yeah, the interesting parts, the ones no one else is doing, the exoplanets that will get me my postdoc. All you’re looking for are things like our solar system, boring rubbish. We already live in one.”
He started packing his palmtop and notebooks away. “What I do isn’t rubbish, and I need a second opinion. I found five pairs of extrasolar Earths from your observations of seventeen solar systems, as opposed to your two hot Jupiters. If you can confirm this and I did find enough extrasolar Earths, I might be able to squeeze in some time myself on the Beast for follow up.”
I sucked air through my teeth. “You would never get to use the Beast!”
“I would before you! Hot Jupiters are no longer so ‘hot.’”
“It’s all early universe high-redshift this, and extrasolar Earths that. Well, no one ever got any science done doing whatever is fashionable.” I used to be like Shakir that way, hopping onto whatever astronomy boat was popular at the time, making my research conform to the norm like a good sheep. It was only now, when I broke my own path, that I resented what I had been.
“Searching for extraterrestrial life is more than a trend,” he said.
“You should stop polluting your brain with science-fiction crap and aliens. It never comes true.”
“I’ll enjoy the look on your face when I do find them, and no less on one of these extrasolar Earths.”
“On that day I’ll be too busy checking you into the mental hospital.”
“But aliens aren’t nearly as insane as some of your pet theories,” he said. “What was that one you had, about the magnetic fields of mini-Earths? Then it was the mercury core of Gamma Cephei E. And hopefully you’ve ditched your hypothesis on the polar atmospheres of hot Jupiters.”
Ingrid snorted. “Stick to observations.”
“Shut up. Better to dream and fall a thousand times than . . . be like the pair of you.” And then something suddenly occurred to me. “Ohhh, Shakir,” I said, trying to sound kind.
“Mei, you know I hate it when you say that.” He was standing now, zipping up his backpack.
“If I check over your work, I’ll get first billing on the papers.”
He groaned. “Fine.”
“And, if in the unlikely event, which is about as likely as you finding aliens, you get time on the Beast, might you squeeze in a few directions to call on some of my hot Jupiters?”
“I’ll consider it.”
“I can check over some of your older data too.”
“And if I do find aliens, you won’t put me in white?”
“Done.”
I worked through the night, stopping only once to give a tutorial at eight p.m. It was a general astronomy course meant for undergraduates of the artistic persuasion who did not know a black hole from their own navels and were still under the impression that winter happened when the Earth was farther away from the Sun. They were there for the distribution credit, I was there for the cash, and so generally we had an understanding.
* * * *
Shakir had outdone himself. I could not find a single blasted mistake in his calculations, for once, which meant that I could be making a mistake. I arrived in my apartment at two a.m., with curry and naan from the only Indian place open past midnight. I pushed aside clothes, books, and electronics from my couch to make a seat and dug in.
With two exceptions, the Cabal was relatively quiet tonight. In a poster beside the light fixture on my ceiling, Lisa Randall wrote out calculations on her blackboard. From his desk on the wall above my monitor, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar read a book. One of his corners was starting to curl from the heat. On my fridge Richard Feynman was playing his bongo drums again, while above him, on my freezer door with a magnet over his forehead, Galileo Galilei was shushing him. Richard grinned impishly and made a lewd comment about Galileo’s frock.
On the wall across from me, Annie Cannon turned away from her photographic plate to give me a good squinting. “Found any more hot Jupiters today?” she asked.
“Shakir sucked me into that extrasolar Earth garbage,” I said and stuffed a large slop of curry on naan into my mouth. “But just for a while, until I can hijack some time on the Beast. Then, if I have one success they’ll give me more time, even for something different. At least, that’s how it has worked for the space telescopes in the past. So then I’ll apply for use a second time without the ESE-baggage, and have it all to myself. I hate these politics, this paperwork, this kissing ass for resources. I just want to do science with my life.”
“Hear hear!” Richard said, and gave his bongo drum a particularly vigorous whack.
“At least you didn’t have to worry about politics or funding in your day,” I said to Galileo. “You could just go out and discover stuff, since almost everything remained undiscovered.”
“Don’t talk to me about politics,” Galileo said. “I had to deal with the Catholic Church.”
I curled up and did some marking, and only spilled curry on two papers. The spectra fared better: only one drop of curry. I really started to question myself when still I failed to see anything Shakir did wrong, especially given the statistical anomaly of this sample. But there was little doubt, even within error, that those five solar systems had Earth-sized planets, two at once. I checked my watch. Seven a.m., time for bed.
I slept very little that morning and awoke early, just after one p.m., drawn to my computer. Still in pajamas, unwashed and unfed, I remotely logged into my work account and called up the data, needing greater detail than the printouts Shakir had supplied me with. There had to be more planets in these five systems that all seemed to have exactly two extrasolar Earths. Just as he only focused on the signatures of Earth-sized planets and I only focused on those belonging to Jupiter-sized planets; the rest got discarded.
The easiest to find were pairs of Jupiter-sized ones in all five, them being the largest. Of course, none of these were hot Jupiters—they were too far away from their suns for that—but neither were they so far from their suns as to be cold Jupiters. In fact, they might be considered just-right Jupiters like Baby Bear’s porridge, at a distance from their suns comparable to our Jupiter. The planets that were Saturn-sized were the second easiest to pick out in the five systems. Next came the extrasolar Neptunes in pairs, and last the hardest to spot, being the smallest, extrasolar Marses. All these planets lined up in the same order from their sun: closest the two extrasolar Earths, the Mars, the Jupiter, the Saturn, and farthest the two Neptunes.
I rolled my chair back and did not want to touch my keyboard again, very disturbed by what I had just seen.
“Are you well?” Subrahmanyan asked me from above my monitor, putting his book down.
“I thought first, perhaps I had observed the same solar system five times by accident? But that can’t be. The solar systems all have different coordinates in our sky, I remember doing different levels of correction for reddening from varying amounts of interstellar gas between us and them. And their suns are known to be at different ages. These five solar systems have to be different, and yet they’re the same.”
“Why must they be different?” he asked.
“Because the exoplanets in every solar system observed have a random distribution, various sizes and distances from their suns. It’s like a box of chocolates,” I said, stammering. “Here, though, all at once I’ve discovered five systems that follow some correlation. What does this mean? Will this revolutionize planet-formation theory, favor one of those theories over the other, or destroy them all? Are solar systems predisposed to form their planets in a certain order?”
I turned my head sideways and looked at my monitor another way. “They’re just like our solar system! My methods can’t see something the size of Mercury, but I bet that the Mercuries would be out there too. One of each of Shakir’s extrasolar Earths is a Venus, and one in the Neptune pairs is a Uranus. Those planets have similar masses. You should know that, Subra.” Venus was Earth’s twin planet, a rock similar in size, radius and distance from our sun, only where Earth had been perfect for life, on Venus a runaway greenhouse gas effect reigned, making its atmosphere thick, clouded, and uninhabitable. Ingrid had once told me that Venus was like a prophecy, a warning of what Earth would soon become.
“I have the key to the Beast!” I cried.
From my kitchen, I could hear Richard smacking a victory jam on his bongo drums.
In ten minutes I wrote up my new proposal for the gatekeepers of the BST and emailed copies to Shakir and our supervisor, Dr. Onishi. Investigating this strange pattern we had stumbled upon would be far more satisfying than pairs of extrasolar Earths alone.
Dr. Onishi summoned me to her office in the tower that afternoon. The giant clock on her wall ticked the seconds by. Nine days. I had nine days left before the BST became available and I would not suffer to be left out of the first round. A hazy sunset spilled across the horizon from behind the Toronto skyline, leaching its glare into Dr. Onishi’s office. She ran a finger down her window, and the glass darkened.
“I dislike west-facing offices,” she said, rolling back into her desk. She passed me a printout of my report, bleeding red from her old-fashioned penned corrections. “Did you do a statistical significance test?” she asked, picking up a fork and fishing around in a bucket of poutine that was as big as her head. “Do you know the probability of this happening spontaneously? Five identical systems out of the seventeen you observed?”
“Well, with dozens of exoplanets being discovered every day between hundreds of astronomers, you’d think that a coincidence would have happened to someone. Do I even need the test?”
“I did it. You’ve less than a thousandth of a percent of seeing the exoplanets you got from your spectra, which means there’s a bias in your data taking or processing. Now that lovely hot Jupiter you were writing up about? Wrong, all wrong. I’ve called the observatory to get them to test their equipment’s calibration.” Dr. Onishi was always efficient and quick, a publisher, not a perisher. As a graduate student alone she had refined two methods of detecting exoplanets. I would sleep easier if only I could accomplish half as much.
“There’s nothing wrong with my data,” I said, voice rising. “I’ve checked it over; I’m careful, always.”
She pointed a fry-speared, plastic fork at me. It dripped a lump of gravy-drenched cheese onto her desk, which she ignored. “But clearly you can’t have seen so many solar systems identical to ours from a random sample. It’s an impossibility. Go over it again from the beginning, and then I’ll consider sending it off to the Beast. You have a day.”
“A day?” I asked. “I’m already late for my hot Jupiter paper.”
Dr. Onishi pointed the fork to her clock. “Time’s ticking. If you would rather write a paper, I could pass this on...”
It was not the giant clock that told the time she had pointed to, but a smaller one on her other wall I noticed only now. Instead of counting up, it counted down to a time very familiar to me. It seemed I was not the only one with a doomsday clock centered on the BST.
“I’ll do it.” I turned to leave.
“One more thing, Mei,” she said. “Next time you’ve data, look at the whole of it and not just your hot Jupiters.”
For the rest of the night, I feverishly reprocessed my raw spectra. The Moon crossed the sky, a pizza delivery came for me, everyone else on the floor went home, and still I worked, fingers flying from keyboard to mouse, and my gaze ran across my monitor.
I did not know I had fallen asleep until I woke up near noon to a pencil jab in my ribs. I wrenched the pencil from the poking hand.
“Hey!” Shakir said.
I held the pencil tip to his neck. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”
“It’s a great stunt, you have me there. Imagine, saying there are many solar systems like ours out there. This might be the pet theory of yours that’s actually convincing.”
“It is not a stunt!” I said, standing. “It’s the truth. I know what I see. Look at it for yourself.”
He scrambled back to his desk. “If these five systems are so similar to ours then they too may be the perfect storms to create life.”
“This isn’t about finding your little green aliens! This is about overthrowing fucking planetary formation theory!” I tossed him his pencil and furiously started commanding print runs of my past day’s work. “Read it!”
“Okay, okay.”
“No one asked my opinion.” Ingrid was marking undergraduates’ tests. Her lips moved while she read the papers, circling her pen in the air as she decided the destinies of her disciples. “I think you’re crazy.”
“Thanks,” I said.
After adding my recalculations, Shakir’s proofing, and Dr. Onishi’s input, I had a spruced-up proposal that would be irresistible to the BST’s gatekeepers. I sent it to them with eight days to go, pointing out other weaker proposals that others had submitted and how I was much more deserving of their time. They responded to me in six days.
* * * *
“I hate them!” I said, spinning in circles, kicking up the clothes and books that covered my living room floor. “When I’m professor, I’ll build my own space telescope, twice as big and shiny with a bow on it, and I’ll reject them all. Then they’ll know what it feels like.” I sank down into my couch and snapped open a beer bottle. My headphones were jutting into my butt. I ignored them, having much bigger problems.
Shakir had come as soon as he heard the news. He was still standing by my door, eyeing the piles of junk that surrounded him as if he was Zheng He and they the Indian Ocean. I could see the calculation in his eyes as he tried to determine the optimal route to my couch.
“Just step on it,” I said.
“But you never do your laundry,” he said. “I’m afraid if I put my footprint on your clothes it’ll be there for a year.”
“I hope you like Thai. Here in ten minutes or it’s free.”
He held up a data-neb. “I brought some entertainment. The complete seasons of Red Dwarf, Battlestar Gallactica, Dollhouse.”
“You’re still obsessed with classic television, then?”
He stepped across the mess of the floor, one foot at a time, seeking the maximum number of gaps possible. I shoved stuff off my couch to give him a place next to the beer packs.
We clicked our bottles together.
“To the rejects,” I said.
“The rejects!”
I chugged down half the bottle. A while ago I had discovered a one-to-one monotonically increasing correlation between the quantity of alcohol I consumed and how tolerable Shakir became to me.
“If it helps,” he said, swallowing, “I had a peek at the order lined up for the very moment the Beast goes into operation. They just released it an hour ago. First, they are looking at Andromeda, then the Eagle Nebula, then solar system EPH1889.”
“That’s one of our five,” I said.
“Guess what?” he asked. “A team from Victoria found two extrasolar Earths on it, like we did. They’ll look at the larger one first, and then the smaller one.”
“Damn it. I told you I wasn’t crazy,” I said. “Even other people have verified at least one of these systems! So we got rejected on basis of overlap.”
“Exactly.”
The Thai came in eleven minutes and twelve seconds. We had to take our victories where we could. The thing with the Thai food was it was spicy, and the thing with beer was that it tended to dull the heat on one’s tongue, and the thing with memory was that it tended to run away when beer knocked on the door.
So I awoke upside down some time in late morning, feet pressed to wall, legs diagonally across couch, shoulders on floor, mouth dry, head throbbing with pain. I turned my head left to see my headphones in my face. I turned my head right to see my bike wheel, having been driven across the floor over my books. The advantage of a messy apartment was that it was invariant under trashing. I carefully eased myself upright.
Shakir lounged back in my desk chair, slumbering in the embrace of someone familiar.
“You are wrapped up in Galileo!”
“Ugg,” Shakir replied, still asleep.
I kicked through empty beer bottles to reach him, unwound the poster off of Shakir carefully so as not to rip it, and frantically tried to smooth Galileo out and reattach him to the freezer. “So sorry,” I told him.
Galileo returned a scowl. Richard winked.
“Who were you talking to?” Shakir asked. He now sat upright, fully awake.
“No one!”
Beside Subrahmanyan’s place over my monitor hung a poster of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that mapped out the temperature and brightness of stars. They tended to clot together in groups. The most prominent clots were the white dwarfs, small star-corpses that no longer underwent nuclear fusion; then the supergiants, unusually bright stars in the prime of life; and the largest clot, more of a stream really, the main sequence where most stars spent the majority of their cycle. Our sun was a main-sequence star, would fatten into a red giant in a couple billion years, and later retire as a white dwarf.
Five pins protruded from my diagram. Three were at the main sequence, the fourth was on the verge of the red giant branch, while the fifth sat amongst the T Tauris, a short phase of young stars whose group hardly made an impact on the diagram.
“I don’t believe it. First you abuse Galileo, and now you deface my Hertzsprung-Russell diagram?” I asked. “Fracking smeghead.”
Shakir turned around to see what I was staring at. “Pin the tail on the star?” he asked with a shrug. “Who’s to say that you didn’t do that?”
I walked toward it and tripped over Ingrid, who had been sleeping on my floor. She grunted and began to stir. An empty beer can fell off her forehead. I could not recall at which point in the night she had joined us.
“Did you do this?” I asked, and ripped the pins from the poster.
* * * *
I attended the department’s BST launch party with a Big Byte chocolate bar in one hand and a giant Pinkberry smoothie in the other. It was six p.m. Around me my fellow astronomers and a number of physicists and mathematicians chattered, the words all going over my head. We filled a lecture hall. There were balloons thrown around, streamers, a snack cart. At the front they were having difficulties navigating the controls of a super-definition projector. I watched them blankly, unmoving, willing it to work. We had already missed the launch of the BST itself into orbit.
“The big day,” Ingrid said, taking the seat beside me. “Cheer up.”
“Big for them.” I took a noisy sip from my smoothie.
“You’re such a grump.”
Shakir sat to my other side. At least he looked as upset as I felt. When one was miserable there was nothing more infuriating than the sight of happy people, the inverse of schadenfreude. I did not want to suffer alone.
“Chocolate?” I asked, offering him the bar.
He responded by raising his Big Byte Double Precision.
“You win,” I said.
A balloon bopped me on the head. I seized it with a scowl and popped it with my nails.
The projector’s blue screen flickered into a scene at the BST’s control room in Vancouver, rows of people at their computer terminals wearing headsets, typing, talking, turning knobs, and flipping switches on their circuit boards.
Cheers erupted in our lecture hall at the sight, and then everyone quieted to watch the projection.
The gray control room suddenly flashed to a red and white scene. Some knowledgeable-looking scientist stood at a podium with our flag behind him. The caption told us that he was Dr. Arnold Masamba, Vice Director of the BST. He adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, cleared his throat, patted the microphone clipped to his suit collar, and started speaking.
“Initial inspections of the Behemoth Space Telescope have all proven to be positive. The telescope is fully functional. It is receiving directions from headquarters now and in a few moments shall be focusing on the M31 galaxy to take its very first images.”
Cut to the control room, once stale but now full of life as its people rose from their seats and started clapping. Cut to a few politicians, smiling as photographers snapped their pictures. Cut to an image of the Beast, freefalling in Earth’s orbit. Cut to Dr. Masamba again, taking questions from reporters.
I threw my empty smoothie bottle to the floor.
They showed us infrared Andromeda. It was beautiful, and after a delay we saw the Eagle Nebula and it was glorious, but I hardly paid attention. I was awaiting one thing: EPH1889’s turn.
Because planets at the distance of solar system EPH1889 were still point sources to us, we would not see an image in terms of space like the images for Andromeda and the Eagle Nebula, which were larger objects in the sky. Instead what the BST was doing now was gathering the intensity of electromagnetic radiation from this particular point source planet in each wavelength to produce my sought-after blackbody spectrum.
When this came up on the screen it was less impressive than the imagery of the galaxy and nebula. This was rough, for the scientific processing would take days, but the distinctive blackbody-hill was there, along with the absorption lines from materials in the planet’s atmosphere. I noticed lines in the spectrum from carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone. The rest of the mess I was unfamiliar with, but I knew enough to see that even in atmosphere this exoplanet was similar to Earths.
“Chlorofluorocarbons!” Ingrid cried.
“Ow, my ear,” I said. “What . . . chloroflablah?”
“CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons,” she said, trying to speak up over the erupting chatter around us as others got excited. People were leaping out their chairs, screaming. “I recognize their signature in the absorption lines. They’re a group of anthropogenic compounds from the twentieth century used for refrigeration, cleaners, aerosols; huge ozone gobblers.”
I could feel my heart pound faster. “Truly?”
“That got them banned in the 1980s Montreal Protocol.”
“Let me backtrack for a moment. So when you said they were anthropogenic...”
“CFCs don’t occur naturally. Synthetic.”
“Intelligent life,” Shakir shouted. “They just discovered extraterrestrials!”
“It should have been us,” I whispered with a sigh.
* * * *
News spreads fast. This was the sort of news you call all your friends and family for in the middle of the night. This was the sort of news everyone checked for on the Internet every minute to seize every last drop of updates, while getting hammered with their friends. Aliens were on par with the discovery of the wheel; only there had been no media in ancient Mesopotamia.
I never bought newspapers, since they were sensationalized lies, but on my bike waiting at the traffic lights on my way to work the following afternoon, I caught glimpses of the headlines in people’s hands or sitting in the newspaper boxes, when I was not coughing from the smog.
Aliens! Aliens! Aliens!
Behemoth Space Telescope Finds Extraterrestrials
We Are Not Alone
E.T. Phones Earth
First Evidence For Life on Other Worlds
Aliens Better Not Be Protestant: Pope
Extraterrestrial and the Beast
Will They Come in Peace?
New Space Telescope Takes Shocking Images of Life in Distant Solar System
Beast Sniffs Out Aliens
* * * *
In the office, Ingrid had some familiar plots up on her monitors.
“Aren’t those the spectra from the Beast last night?” I asked, leaning on her chair. “They released them to just any scientist?”
“I’m not just any scientist!” Ingrid said indignantly, tapping a pen on her monitor. “After the traces of several synthetic chemicals were confirmed on the first, larger of the two extrasolar Earths in the EPH1889 system, everyone ignored the blackbody spectra of the smaller one. Here it is. See those large gaps? That comes from absorption in an atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, with a copious concentration of sulphuric acid.”
“An extrasolar Venus,” I said, which confirmed my suspicions.
“Indeed. I subtracted the blackbody spectra of this planet from that of our Venus. Within experimental error they match. It’s incredible.”
“But what about the extrasolar Earth and our Earth?” I asked.
“Ah.” She clicked a few things on her dock and pulled up the appropriate windows. “They’re similar, but don’t match. For example, we have more carbon dioxide and methane by several factors, but they seem to have more CFCs, nitrous oxides, and ozone. Our planet is warmer than theirs by a few degrees, nudging our blackbody spectrum down a little.”
“The aliens are destroying their atmosphere too! Maybe we should send them warning signals.”
“The Beast is now taking the blackbody spectra in more detail for every planet in EPH1889,” she said. “I’ll soon do this analysis for them too! This is so juicy.”
I returned to my desk with a grunt and found that the doomsday clock had gone into the negative. I clicked it shut furiously. My inbox was full of emails from people bursting to share the news or asking me to verify it. I ignored them, not wanting to deal with emotional non-scientists at the moment, and pulled up arXiv instead. There was something comforting in the crisp, clinical prose of research papers. Like my inbox, arXiv was flooded with everyone and their gerbil’s theories on the BST’s discovery. I cut out all the planetary stuff and instead skimmed the observational cosmology. It was guaranteed to be exo-planet-free and a topic I had long ignored, but now I needed escape.
Cosmologists enjoyed exploiting the likes of supernovae and other standard candles to probe every nook, wrinkle, and blip of space’s curvature to map out the shape of our universe as far back in time as light could travel. Apparently there were extra spatial dimensions out there that astronomers had to account for when taking measurements at long distances. I had the luxury of treating space as flat because my observations only took me as far as the Milky Way and the rest of the Local Group.
Someone rapped on our door and I jumped. It was Dr. Onishi. She waved a piece of paper and said, “Good news, everyone. It seems that a certain two of my grad students will get time on the BST after all.”
Ingrid turned to me with a grin. “It’s your time to dream, Mei.”
* * * *
“We won’t be here long,” I told the Cabal just as I finished unrolling Lisa and sticking her to the ceiling. Beside her, directly over my bed, was my mutilated Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, still with the holes. The room they had given me at the BST headquarters in Vancouver could have been more accurately described as a cell: cold, gray, and metallic. A Spartan would have been at home here.
It was too clean. I could not sleep in clean places, no matter how tightly I closed my eyes to pretend otherwise. I saw the bookshelf I had just spent several minutes sliding my books onto, considered it for a moment, and then threw all the books to the ground. I opened my suitcase and sprinkled my clothes everywhere, over the floor, on my bed, and tossed a few socks onto the bookshelves. Better.
Annie and Richard were arguing over solar interiors, but went quiet when my door was pushed open.
“What’re you doing?” Shakir asked.
“Decorating,” I said.
He took a bottle from his pocket and held it toward me. “Anti-jetlag pills, calibrated for Pacific Time.”
“Obeying time zones is for the weak.”
He took it back. “They did give us the nine p.m. shift tomorrow.”
“Do you think the food here is any good?”
By heading to the cafeteria, we experimentally verified that this was not the case. I had grabbed a heap of cardboard-flavored chili and a quivering tower of blue jelly, while Shakir did not fare so well with his lo mein and piece of guava pie. Perhaps when designing the meals, the chefs thought the Beast was not the telescope, but who they were supposed to be feeding.
We sat alone at our table while another group of astronomers were gathered around something I could not see. Shakir and I pulled out our papers, discussing the order in which we would view our four systems.
“You know,” he said at last, “this is the first time we’ve worked together on something.”
“Keep that between us,” I said. “I don’t want my reputation ruined.”
He smiled. “I told you extrasolar Earths were more interesting than hot Jupiters.”
“Shut up.”
Groans erupted from the group. I rose from my seat and tapped the tall one on the shoulder. She turned to me, and I saw the source of their attention: the very small monitor of a palmtop displaying zigzag lines of black and white static.
“Catching the latest cosmic microwave background radiation?” I asked.
The astronomer stared at me down her long nose and flipped a length of curls over her shoulder. “You’re the ones from Toronto, aren’t you?” From the tone in her voice, she might as well have been asking if we were from a pigsty.
I glanced at her nametag. “At least we’re not from Newfoundland. What’re you watching?”
A few of them moved back so that Shakir and I could join in and get a good look at the palmtop.
“Every telescope in working order on Earth, around Earth, on the Moon and Mars is now pointed toward the alien-inhabited exoplanet in the EPH1889 system, naturally,” she said. “And I’ve clearance with several of those.” She put emphasis on this as if this made her more important than all the other astronomers around her. “We’re watching live images as the Shirt tries to pick up signals in the television frequency from that very planet.”
The Shirt was the SHRT—Sawyer Hogg Radio Telescope.
I stared at the static. Nothing was happening, and just as I turned to leave, someone gasped and was shushed.
The static had become an image of two aliens in conversation. I held my breath and absorbed everything before my eyes. The aliens were brown-skinned humanoids, with all the appropriate limbs and features and eyes etcetera that we had; only their foreheads were high and ridged. Both aliens had mangy black hair to their shoulders. Black suits were their chosen attire, with some sort of chain mail belt slung diagonally across their shoulders and torsos. They stood in a beige, well-lit room in front of metallic panels on which several yellow and red LEDs flashed.
“Turn it up,” one of the astronomers said.
The aliens spoke to one another in a harsh, halting language that I did not recognize as any on Earth. A pair of doors slid open then, and in walked a third humanoid. He was shorter, bald and might have resembled any ordinary white-skinned human wearing a red and black spandex bodysuit. A triangular swoosh-shaped metal pin was fastened over his left breast. In fact, except for the peculiar clothing I saw nothing alien about him.
Static overcame the scene and everyone in the cafeteria started cursing the palmtop.
“Hey!” Shakir said. “That’s the best part of the episode. The Klingons were just about to capture Patrick Stewart.”
“Who is Patrick Stewart and what do they want to cling on to him?” I asked.
“He was the star of a late-twentieth-century series called Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he played the captain of a spaceship that explores the galaxy. Those ‘aliens’ were just humans in makeup.”
“So the extraterrestrials are pirating our campy science fiction shows.”
“It isn’t campy.”
“A prank.” The Newfie sniffed with distaste. “It has to be. I cannot accept that was truly the Shirt’s transmission.”
Eleven a.m.: Despite the complete mess in my cell, I was unable to sleep that morning. I tossed and threw my blankets off the bed, staring up at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram stuck to the ceiling, feeling that somehow I had missed something. The pinholes nagged at me. I needed to get a new poster when I returned to Toronto.
Eight p.m.: Shakir and I went over our plan of attack once more together, and decided to look at our four exoplanets in order of the age of their stars, starting with the youngest. We would only take the spectra of the larger of the two extrasolar Earths, not having time for much else. Those were the ones most likely to have life. I was tired from little sleep, but the sheer adrenalin pushed me through. The hour of the BST was almost upon us.
Nine p.m.: “You have the coordinates, the information, everything ready?” I asked him as we took our seats at the BST’s control computer. Our area, for visiting astronomers, was sectioned off from the main control room. Though we could see it from the glass, they would not be able to overhear us.
“Of course I do,” he said.
“I got the reading material.” I set down my pile of Post-It-note-marked textbooks on atmospheric physics and astronomy. I had come prepared to reference anything that might come up. Who knew what other chemicals aliens might produce?
“All right,” I said, “first the system TOB1546 with the T Tauri-type star. I don’t expect aliens on this one.” T Tauris were young and violent stars, known for ejecting spurts of radiation into their systems. Both the youth of the system and the radiation were good reasons to doubt that they harbored life. “Well, aliens like us, anyway.”
Shakir handed me the keyboard. “You take this one.”
The BST’s control program was familiar to me because I had been given practice sessions since we arrived at the Beast’s headquarters yesterday. It was a simple matter of giving the Beast the proper coordinates and deciding on what type of exposures to take. I typed in the orders quickly. Though the coordinates required some adjustment and the first spectra did not turn out so well, in a matter of a few minutes I got it working.
With Ingrid’s help before I left Toronto, we had been sure to verse ourselves well in the signatures of certain anthropogenic compounds in the blackbody spectra, and I saw none in TOB1546’s extrasolar Earth.
“Mostly hydrogen and helium, two to one ratio,” I said. “Pretty pedestrian stuff. Makes sense that the primordial atmosphere of a terrestrial planet would resemble that of its sun. Next.” I passed him the keyboard.
The second system was that of a main sequence star, though one a few billion years younger than our sun. Calmer and older than the T Tauri, but still too young to support evolution as we knew it.
I was correct. This planet’s atmosphere was mainly water vapor, carbon, and sulphur dioxide.
“Like the composition of volcano vomit,” I said, turning open the appropriate page in an atmospheric text.
“Bu no life still,” he said. “Your turn.”
“No, you take this one too.” I thumbed through the book a little more to be sure.
“I can’t believe this,” he said. “Mei giving up a turn at the controls?”
“I’ll just take the last one,” I said, “the system with the main sequence star that’s about to go red giant, SWH1942. Now that’ll be interesting.”
Our third solar system had a star that was just a hundred million years younger than our sun.
“If any of our four systems have aliens,” he said, “it should be this one.”
He took the blackbody spectra, and we immediately began to flip through my atmospheric books to do a quick in situ analysis of the absorption lines. We saw water vapor and carbon dioxide and tantalizing traces of ozone, but nothing that could be described as anthropogenic.
Earth’s atmosphere was composed mostly of diatomic oxygen and nitrogen, both of which were unreactive species and hard to see in absorption lines. Ozone, however, was the product of ultraviolet rays striking diatomic oxygen. Where there was ozone there was probably diatomic oxygen, and where there was diatomic oxygen there were probably:
“Plants,” Shakir said.
“We can’t be sure,” I said. “I need to show these to Ingrid, maybe even a biologist or two.”
“Earth’s is the only stable atmosphere in our solar system that has more oxygen than carbon dioxide,” he said. “Why is that? Because of plants.” He grinned widely. “We’ve found our own aliens. Not industrialized, intelligent aliens. Brainless, plantlike things, but we have them!”
“Or they’re smarter than us,” I said. “Perhaps they’re industrialized, but don’t crap in their atmosphere like we do. Great, so now you and I will go down in history as the second people to discover extraterrestrial life.”
“But our aliens are better than the CFC makers on EPH1889. Our aliens are environmentally conscious and they don’t pirate our television.”
Suddenly, I remembered the pinholes in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram over my bed and it all made sense. “Many theories say that our sun was once a T Tauri star in its youth,” I found myself saying, pulse quickening, “and during that period the Earth’s primordial atmosphere was made of hydrogen and helium before it all got blown away by the young sun’s radiation. Then it was replaced by a second atmosphere spewed out from the Earth’s interior. The suns in our five systems trace the evolution of our sun.” I seized his shoulder. “Shit. The aliens are us.”
“How?”
“Those aren’t other planets, but ours in the past, somehow, snapshots in time. They watch our classic television, pollute with our old chemicals, and their sun’s younger.” I pointed to the T Tauri system TOB1546 with a shaking finger. “Primordial Earth, I’m sure of it.” I move my finger over the second system. “Earth before life begins.” And the third. “Time of the dinosaurs. As for EPH1889? Late twentieth century, maybe early twenty-first depending on how long your cling-on show aired.”
“Are you sure?” His eyes widened. “This defies everything: string theory, high-energy physics, the whole of astrophysics! Is this from exotic worm holes, cosmic mirrors, what?”
“Yeah, something like that.” Reading over those cosmological papers before I had left Toronto was turning out to be useful after all. “You know how the universe is folded in on itself, that it isn’t flat in space? Well, what if time isn’t flat either? We could be observing the echoes of warped time that turn all of space into a crystal ball. It’d return images of ourselves at certain points in space.”
“But we’re no Einsteins,” he said.
“No, we’re Michelson and Morley. Damn! There could be more systems out there than these five. There could be thousands, mapping out the entire course of our history to us like insects trapped in amber.”
“We’ve seen the past,” he said, drawing back. “Just SWH1942 left. Their star is about to inflate into a red giant. That solar system, our solar system, is dying.”
“Humans mightn’t even be left on Earth!” I cried. “They could’ve moved to the dwarf planets to prepare for the doom, or escaped to another solar system. It’s billions of years from now; we better have mastered interstellar travel. Maybe there’re still stragglers left on Earth, and the Sun’s about to eat them.”
“Should we even dare to peek into the future and see what it holds for humanity?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, punching in the coordinates. “Let’s take a look.”
Copyright © 2010 S.L. Nickerson