A Sky Full of Worlds

By David Pixley

A sky full of worlds
Earth sends an expository expedition to a nearby solar system. They find thousands of habitats and find a mystery. for all of the (millions) of artificial worlds, not one in a thousand is occupied. Will they solve the mysteries inherent in the system?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669846840

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A Sky Full of Worlds

David Pixley

Copyright © 2022 by David Pixley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/09/2022

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Contents

Forward

Summons

Journey

Emergence

Survey

Industrial Park

The Meeting

The Most Important Prisoner

Past and Present

A message in Time

Tour continued

After the Fight

Unwelcome Passenger

Water Mover

Missing Records

Food

The Threat

Solution

Home

Forward

Everyone has heard of Lonely Martin and no one knew what really happened to make him famous. Lonely was a middle aged man, given to solitude, he was amazed that he found a woman that would put up with him. But Carla did, she was older than he was and had knocked around the Asteroid belt for the last forty years. She told him the night that they met that she wanted a child. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter. I want a child to call my own, Oh I’m willing to share but I want a child. Lonely wanted a woman in the same way and if a kid was what she wanted, he wanted it too. They left from Ceres base and every three months they returned to have her checked for signs of pregnancy. Three months was about the limit for a kid to be exposed to low gravity. After that their mother had to be in the artificial gravity of the big spinning wheels of Ceres or the other habitats.

The last time Carla had gotten the word, You’re pregnant. Five or six weeks, no more, do you have the price to stay here? She nodded between her and Lonely she had enough for the next nine months and the hospital at the end. Lonely would miss her but he had to get out and find a strike. It didn’t have to be much a couple of miles of at least three percent silver would be good. Gold or platinum would be better, he checked the Wide Net for metal prices. The best would be a rescue call you got fifty percent of the rescued ship if you got the crew back to a base alive. But that was a one in a million occurrence so he did not expect to find anything like that. He was a little concerned he had only three Spin Down units, they would have to do. He had to dedicate most of his money to Carla and the baby. Spin Downs were the Solid Fuel rockets that would allow you to spin down an asteroid so that you could gather up the metal or other valuables that were in the asteroid. Oxygen and Hydrogen were at a premium now, so was water ice or whatever. You never knew what would bring money in. He found a slow moving asteroid a bit farther out than he would have gone by himself, aloone if he had not had Carla to think about. But he had to take risks to get the money for her and the kid.

Slow spinning asteroids were a toss up, they might mean that someone else had already been there and rejected the flying mountain as worthless. Or they might mean a lucky strike where you did not have to use too many of the expensive Slow Down units, increasing your money for the strike. If he slowed down, that was another trade off. Trading reaction mass for the chance to examine a find. But you couldn’t do a real decent examination at speed. He was about 20,400 klicks from it when he rejected it. There was a clear marking that an exploratory drone had been landed on the center of spin of the asteroid. His radar picked up the cloud of debris that the explorer had drilled up out of the flying mountain. Most of the debris was still in orbit around the surface of the mass.

He shook his head and began to plot the path to the next big concentration of asteroids. He had to travel 73,000 klicks to the next group, seven asteroids in close proximity to one another. All of them close enough to examine with his telescope and none of them with a radio beacon indicating ownership or examination. He began to plot a course to them, doing it several times to find the one with the least cost of transit. He finally got one that saved him at least a twentieth of a klick of delta V. By arriving at the cluster slower than he wanted, he could avoid using reaction mass to slow down to examine the rocks. He laid in the course and got into his chair for the thrust. He’d only accelerate at 90 centimeters a second for about a eleven hundred seconds, but the chair was necessary. You never took a risk this far from a rescue. He waited until the autopilot ticked off the seconds and then hit the go button. It was not necessary, the autopilot would have tripped it in any case but he wanted to feel as if he was really a captain of a ship. He was under weigh for just over 300 seconds when he got a laser message, the communicator began to unravel the message and show it on his view screen.

The face of a man appeared, haggard and sweating Mayday! Sister Rose 57 days out of Great House, we’ve lost water… Sputter, whir, burp, burp, sputter…partner in need of a medical attention. She is… The screen began to flicker and the image rolled then dimmed completely.

Lonely cursed the man hadn’t given any kind of indication of where he was. The laser beam if you could track it would show but the odds against that were like those of being struck by lightning. He was wondering if Great House would have a flight plan for the Sister Rose when the screen lit again. It was the man again, he had a new knot in his head that was oozing blood I’m fading fast, here are the coordinates for the Sister Rose. He gave the coordinates and then coughed If I’m not here when you get here, my partner needs medical… Blur, burp, blat and that was it not another word.

Lonely cut the thrust and began to figure a course to the coordinates to the Sister Rose. He had a recording of the message; his ship had heard the word Mayday and began to record at once. That was a good idea that had a bad edge to it, if you refused to aid someone without a good reason you were in trouble with Fourth Quadrant authority. They weren’t a government but they could do things like forbid you access to repair and food stores, that was usually enough for most people to toe the line. But he wasn’t going to do that. He would see that the partner got all the medical aid that the other half of the ship would bring. The course was at an angle to current the one. He would have plenty of reaction mass left to make a high-speed transit to Ceres and medical care for the partner. The tricky part would be to match speed and course with the Sister Rose. They must have been in transit to Ceres and so he would have to slow and reverse to match course with the Sister Rose. He was glad that he had not finished the burn, but then again the ion trail to the cluster must have been what they saw to use to aim the laser. He worked and plotted and got a rough course to the Sister Rose. This would be a high-speed transit because of the emergency, so he would not have to be too parsimonious of reaction mass. He laid the rough course in and let the autopilot take it. He used the next fifteen minutes to smooth out the course and laid that in. He had seven days to go to match course with the Sister Rose then stop and reverse course to catch the ship. Say eleven days over all, if he (and the folks in the Sister Rose) were lucky. There were no more messages from the Sister Rose.

On the end of day seven his radar got a blip that had to be the Sister Rose. The heat from the environmental module and the residual heat from the engines made it easy to pick out. He had put the course corrections into the autopilot and let it handle the operation. Slow to allow the Sister Rose to catch up with him and begin to pick up speed when Sister Rose was only a few thousand klicks distant.

By day eight he was in telescope range of the ship and he got worried. It was tumbling. The ship was on the path that the man in the message had broadcast but the ship was tumbling. That would not happen unless someone had fiddled with the controls. And it had to be a completely unskilled hand at the controls to let the ship tumble that way. He tried to figure out what he would do when the Sister Rose caught up to him. That occurred on the tenth day, and he brought his ship down to less than twenty klicks from the Sister Rose. Considering what could be done by a mad man with an ion drive that was as close as he wanted to get to the ship. He had tried to contact the ship for the last 24 hours, but got no results. That gave him a thought that made him immediately ashamed of himself. If there weren’t anyone alive on the ship he would get the entire salvage cost of the ship. That would be enough to keep Carla and the baby in high gravity for the next ten years. He checked the sled a final time and began to evacuate the equipment hold on his ship. The launcher sent him and the sled out into the Forever Dark with a shove then he was heading towards the Sister Rose. After a hundred yards he cut the rocket in and gave the sled a dab of speed. He had another trade off; he had to get to the Sister Rose as soon as possible to conserve his suit air. He did have an emergency bottle of air with him but he did not want to crack it if he could help it. His compressor was old and he’d had to fix it recently. He did not want to stress it if he could help it. Not that he had scrimped on it but he had the feeling that that particular piece of equipment had it in for him.

He slowed when he was twenty yards from the ship. He was on course to the ship but off center to the airlock. He matched speed and course with the ship and again, carefully to get the sled close to and matched with the ship. He did not want to try to use the Sister Rose to get back to Ceres. That was uncertain but he knew his ship from top to bottom and wouldn’t trade it for the world. The airlock wasn’t in the center of spin of the ship, but rode around the center where he parked the sled. It was just another five yards but as out of reach as if it had been on the moon. He moved the sled a little forward and the airlock spun below him every ninety seven seconds. He did the calculations and found that it was a little less than a foot a second. He made sure that the sled was on the same course as the ship then took out the line thrower. He checked the head and turned it to Magnetic and fired it at the target near the airlock. The head hit the ship and he smiled then realizing that he had not unbuckled from the sled. He cursed and unbuckled and got himself out of the saddle in time before the torsion on the line started him spinning too.

The line pulled him away from the sled and he began to reel it in. Then the ship played Crack the whip with him and he bit his tongue when he hit the end of the rope. He cursed and tried to lick the blood from his lips and succeeded well enough. He finished pulling in the line and was at the airlock. Usually you’d use the electronic key to open the airlock, but he didn’t have that with him, so he used the manual door lock to open it up. He was in luck, you could sabotage someone’s entrance very effectively simply by locking the inner door open. Both doors on an airlock opened inward, that way the pressure itself kept the door shut. But if the inner and outer doors were both shut and the doors unlocked all you had to do was to wait while the pressures equalized.

Frost formed on his suit and for a second he was cold as the air flowed into the airlock. To complicate things the tumble of the ship had him on his side as soon as he entered the airlock, the tumble wasn’t quite centered ten meters above his head and he slid back and forth on his side as the airlock cycled. It happened slowly enough that he could grab a hand hold and keep himself in place once he saw the problem, but it foreshadowed his trip to the control room. That would be awkward to say the least, he had brought a line with him but that would only mitigate the situation. The door opened half way and stuck. He was concerned, had someone blocked it? Would they clobber him if he came out of the airlock? That was not the case, there was crap all over the floor. Equipment that had fallen out of a storage bin when the ship began to tumble. They must have had the restraint straps undone before the ship began to tumble. The door was open enough for him to squeeze through the gap. The airlock had several clips and hand holds on it for leaving the vehicle. He looped his line over one of the clips and cinched it tight. He looked at the air pressure gage on his wrist and saw that it was high enough for him to remove his helmet. He cut in the sensors for a bit to examine the air, there was more carbon dioxide than he liked but it would be breathable for a bit. He cut the airflow in the suit and removed his helmet. The air was sufficient but there was a stink that he didn’t like. Burned hair and spoiled meat, along with scorched plastic and vomit. It was a dizzying mixture of stink, not something you wanted to smell when you were dizzy from spin. The airlock was on its side when it opened and he had to be careful that he did not fall. But even in this advanced age there were dozens of handholds along the corridor to the Bridge. This was an old Corsair model, older than his but still worth a lot of money. The controls were simple, based on the old soviet model, improve what you want but change the controls as little as possible. Usually all the new improvements were on the right side of the control panel. He used the line to link himself to the handholds and considered putting his helmet back on, but as he moved along the stink from the whatever got less and less obvious. He ran out of line at twenty meters. With ten more meters to go, it was hard, even as he descended, because his suit wasn’t meant for climbing. But he got the final ten meters and found that the gravity was in his favor since it gave him a better grip on the handholds. The spin was only enough to hamper him, thank goodness it wasn’t a full gravity of acceleration.

He found the attitude rockets and fired them without calculating the force. His seat of the pants firing slowed the tumble. He hit the attitude rockets two more times and he had the tumble down to once per hour or so. With the tumble taken care of he sat down to monitor the video cameras to see the inside of the ship. The video monitor began to step through the various scenes in the ship.

The number five view chilled his blood and he stopped it and looked more closely at it. There was a blood splatter along one wall; it wasn’t jam, that’s for sure. Who ever lost that much blood was in trouble. The guy in the message was wounded and that was certain, could the blood` be his? He started the video feed again and watched them flip through the cameras. The final view was of a woman, she was badly hurt and had lost a lot of her hair. She was a brunette and her hair was glossy and soft looking even through the poor image delivered by the camera. She had blood up the sleeves of her ship’s suit, was that the mans blood? The area designation on the camera was useless to him, so he got up and began to travel through the ship looking for the man and the woman. He found the man floating in the center of the ship, globes of blood surrounding him and fully dried. The side of his head had a bloody wound on it. The blood as it had flowed out of his skull had not fallen off but had made a horrible mass on the side of his head. It looked like a stalagmite growing out of his head. That was only natural, the body had been in the center of the ship and fastened to the wall with a cord. There hadn’t been enough gravity to move him to one side or the other.

Lonely shook his head and felt the man’s arm (he wasn’t going to touch the head). He was at room temperature, was it the woman that had done this? Wouldn’t it be a pain if he had traveled this far and had to put her down? The laws about that was the real pain, you could not get any kind of salvage rights if you killed someone in the ship for obvious reasons. He continued through the passenger section into the cargo hold. Things were cleaner here, everything was strapped down and secured. He found her in a corner of the cargo hold furtherest from the bridge. She was unconscious and sleeping, her snores were soft and she looked lovely to Lonely. She must have been fleeing the man. She had a crowbar with her, the kind you used in free fall. An aluminum tube with a fork at one end and a semi circle at the other end as most micro gravity tools it had a lanyard to fasten to his wrist. It was blood stained, the blood had dried around that as the clot on the man’s head. He frowned, he was willing to bet that the wound in the man’s head would fit the side and shape of the tube.

There were food containers near her and several free fall water bottles. Most of the food and water was gone. She had become incontinent at some point while she slept. There was a pill bottle nearby it was almost empty. He didn’t recognize the drug or whatever it was but he would have to be on the laser soon enough to find out what it was. He hesitated, how could he clean her up? The mess in her pants was enough to gag a skunk and she couldn’t be in good shape with poop next to her vagina.

Carla had surprised him when she told him Girls don’t wipe forward, they wipe backward. You don’t want to get poop near the vagina. That can make you sick, very sick. He remembered seeing the restroom back in the living quarters. He took a hold of her by the cleanest spot he could find on the ship’s suit and towed her down the corridor to the restroom. She moaned when he first started to move her and he saw that she had wound on her leg. It was on her thigh and very big and an angry red around the scab. But it had crusted over and it would have to wait until he got her cleaned up. He removed the gloves from his space suit and fastened them on his belt, then he did the same thing with the helmet. That left his face clear, the nearby kitchen was the source of most of the bad smell. He’d take care of that as soon as he finished with her. The shower was a clear bag with a collar to leave the head out of the shower. He removed the ship’s suit, she moaned when he drug it over the wound in her leg. It was worse when he saw it without the ship’s suit to cover it. She was wearing panties but no bra, he wondered at that. Usually the females in a ship like this had a bra that would hold the vacuum placeholder that that would keep their breasts from expanding in the vacuum. He got the suit off and then distastefully removed her panties. They were very soiled and he put them inside of the ship’s suit. He would take them to the ship’s laundry later. He stuffed her into the shower and then found another problem. The shower was meant to be used by a person that was wide-awake, not from the outside. He thought about it and then just shrugged and turned it on. The controls were on the pedestal that held the plastic bag that was the shower, and they were meant to be turned on by a person’s feet. But he could turn them on from outside with a little work. Normally you would get a ten minute cycle that would blow soap over you, then allow you to scrub and then rinse. The water was roughly filtered and recycled through until the final rinse and that was fresh water. He held down the selector and then pushed the time dial until it was at maximum. She was still sleeping but when the water struck her eyes opened and she looked directly at Lonely. She blinked and then subsided back into sleep. He took the dirty ships suit down to the laundry (at the other end of the restroom) and shoved it into the laundry hamper. He returned to the restroom and washed his hands then looked at her. The jets at the bottom of the pedestal were circling and cleaning. She looked better already, but far from what she would look like when the shower was done.

That reminded him, the guy: he had said that the ship was out of water but there seemed to be at least enough for her to shower. But while he thought of that he had to get the body tucked away somewhere. Cold would do the job that he wanted done. He had to preserve the body until it got back to Ceres at least, or would Great House be a better destination? He thought about it while he found a big plastic bag. The kind you used for samples or nuggets of metal. It was about three yards by three yards and he didn’t have any kind of trouble getting the body inside. He held his breath and searched the man’s pockets, he found the rocket lock out keys in his right front pocket. But now where to store the body? The space outside of the ship wouldn’t do, vacuum wouldn’t keep him cold unless he kept it in the shade, but if he used some liquid nitrogen on it, the body would last forever if it was frozen then put into vacuum outside. The prospectors used liquid nitrogen for a lot of things but mostly to freeze a material so that you could break off a piece of it easily. He found the tank and pressure was up and it had not been used. He put the hose inside of the bag and turned it on, a few seconds later he was certain he had frozen the body. He had put a oxy mask on when he started and kept checking the oxy content of the compartment, it was all right. Sure enough the body was starting to steam, he turned the liquid nitrogen off and sealed the bag. He pulled on gloves and began to fold the body inside of the bag. When he had it in a manageable shape he moved it down the corridor and to the airlock. He put a line on it and began to cycle the airlock, when the light indicating vacuum came on he nodded. The body would be fine, frozen and in vacuum until he got to Ceres.

Time to check his patent, she was waking slowly as if she had gone as far in sleep as she could and was about to take the next step, into death, when he found her. He turned the shower off and evacuated the shower. He checked her leg and saw that there was a large scab on it. He shook his head, could the feces in her ship’s suit have become mixed in the blood? He didn’t want her to have to fight an infection while she came out of it. The rest of her body was clean enough, so should he remove the scab and slap a bandage on it? He decided he should, he didn’t know what was in her but he had to dope her anyway. He found a hypodermic and gave her a shot to deaden the pain in the leg then began to remove the scab. It was still soft from the shower but it had had a long time to set up. He searched for dressings and made a find that encouraged him. It was a special dressing, one that would be used for a large wound. It would also debride the wound it was placed on. He used the dressing for autolytic debriding, putting a dressing on the wound that would keep the scab soft and easily removed. The dressing itself would remove any necrotic tissue and leave the healthy tissue alone. He used a towel on her and thought that he had gotten most of the crud off of her. He slid her into fresh underwear and then wrapped a sheet around her.

He felt awful: the nearness of her body reminded him of the time away from Carla, but he continued to work and put it out of his mind. A few minutes with a wash pad cleaned her face. He nodded and thought she would do until he had time to check her again. Next he had to check in with Ceres, oh yeah and close in on his ships position. He would tow the Sister Rose to Ceres with his ship. He would do that by unshipping the cradle that a prospector ship used for a large body, usually a rock with high metal content. He returned to the control room and used the maneuvering rockets to move the Sister Rose towards his ship. The time displayed showed over 24 hours to close in on his ship. In the meantime he would get some sleep. He’d been going for over 19 hours straight and was starting to drag. He visited the kitchen and got a sandwich and a glass of juice. When he was finished he found a place and dimmed the lights for sleep.

He was flying again, soaring in the clouds and waving to people that he passed. There were homes nearby and people that lived in them were friendly and waved at him. He carelessly hit a house, it hurt, he tried to fly again but hit the same house again, which hurt worse.

He opened his eyes and saw a shape moving between him and the light. It was the woman; she was tumbling and held the crowbar that she had used on the other man. The blow she had delivered made her tumble; she was scrambling to find a purchase to slow her tumble. He began to reach out with his left hand and a stab of pain stopped him. She had clipped him on the arm a good one, he looked down and saw that the skin wasn’t broken. Maybe it was a hairline fracture, he didn’t know but he did know that he did not want to get hit again. He reached out with his righthand and unclipped himself from the line. In the meantime she had stopped tumbling and swung on him again. He moved out of the way of the crowbar except for the heel of his boot. She got that and it gave him impetus so that he was slowly spinning around his head. She had gotten spin off of the blow as well and was frantically trying to get herself stopped so she could hit him again. He got a glimpse of her face; she looked like a statue of anger, eyes wide open, nostrils flared and her lips drawn back exposing her teeth. She was gasping and having trouble breathing, she was so angry. As she tumbled past he saw that he could break his tumble by kicking her softly. He did and she squawked and spun faster. He bounced into the side of the corridor and grabbed a handhold with his left arm. That was a mistake; a jolt of pain ran up his arm and almost made him faint. By luck she had swung the crowbar into side of the corridor and canceled most of her momentum. She got her feet under her and pushed off towards him with the crowbar raised for a final blow. He did a crunch, folding his legs up towards his head and then kicked out again. The kick missed her body but got the arm holding the crowbar. She let it go and it sped away down the corridor, she hit him in a literal flying tackle. She was gasping for breath and trying to rake his face with her fingernails. She was close enough to breath on him; her breath stank like a sanitation tank. She had a grip on his ship’s suit and swiped with her other hand. He blocked the blow to his face and was spun by the blow so that his feet were near her head and her feet were near his head. He saw the bandage and grabbed the leg. He slammed a fist into the bandage, she spasmed with the pain. He hit her again, blood or fluid spurted out the side the bandage, she gave such a despairing cry that he felt sorry for her right then. She kicked him with the un-captured leg and all the sorrow disappeared. The pain must have cleared her mind, she began to sob words that he was too busy to understand Mine, all mine. Bas… No, mine. All the money you could ever wan.... Not yours, its not YOURS! The last was screamed and she grabbed his leg and bit a big mouthful. But that was a mistake on her part, she hadn’t given her jaws enough room to work on the mouthful of flesh. He hit the bandage again and again. She screamed an unpleasant sound but at least she let his leg go. She was finally reduced to tears, and pleading No, let me have it. Its mine, not yours. Please, please, please let me have it.

He shook his head, and snapped the line off the handhold and began to tie her up. She struggled as he tied her up but he was stronger than her, even with his bad arm. She continued to plead with him for it and he got an idea. Yeah you can have it, I promise you can have it. Do you know where it is? I’ll get it for you right away if you can tell me where to look for it. Come on, tell me where it is and we’ll go together to get it.

She slumped when he said that, Good, good, in the cargo area. Red pod, its in the red pod. He hoped that he did a good enough job on the ties, but thought that he’d just have to do until he could spend more time on them. He towed her down the corridor to the cargo section and located the red pod. Her face lit when she saw it and began to nod That’s it, open it now would you? Please? I want my, my, thing. He found a cleat in on a support and tied her to it. He looked at the pod; it was a standard type, color-coded to find it easily. He touched the controls and the pod lock opened. It opened away from him and he turned it with his hand so he could see inside. He heard her sigh, but all he saw was a trophy, what they called a loving cup. It was made out of a kind of gray metal, and on second look he saw that there wasn’t any base on the thing, you could never stand it up under normal gravity. And there were connections along the handles of the cup, they looked like electrical connections to him. He looked at her and saw her face was rapturous and completely absorbed in looking at the thing. He thought that she looked as if she was one of the Knights of the Round Table looking at the Holy Grail.

He told many people about that for years.

It was the first Non-human artifact ever found and literally priceless. It was one of the I’scurza relic of course, one of a dozen found in the solar system over the next fifty years. The thing was found on a CHON asteroid, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen were the elements of life and what a traveler would have stopped to get in a strange solar system. Most of the relics had been found at the asteroid where the Sister Rose had stopped. Water would always cover the price of a trip, and Hans Yoder (the guy in the message) stopped and then hit it deep radar pulse. He found the relic then on the CHON asteroid and the others were found on a piece that had been chopped off of the main asteroid. Lucy Hoydens had discussed it with him and in her excitement unfortunately missed the medication for her schizophrenia. Over the next couple of days they had gloated at the prospect of the money that the relic had represented. Something had set her off and she had gotten the crowbar and went after Hans. He managed to subdue her and fed her restraint medication. He managed to make the call after locating the ion trail from Lonely’s ship. The water he had spoken of was the restraint drug she had not taken (he used the Dutch pronunciation of the word and it sounded like water).

Lonely attached the Sister Rose to his ship with the large grabber and they made their way back to Ceres. He had more restraint medication in his ship but didn’t have to use it as long as he let her sit in front of the relic. He tied her to a column with one arm free and a camera focused on her. She would reach out and touch it from time to time and that made her happy. The sale of the Sister Rose brought him enough for Carla to stay in gravity for the next year and for another child as well. Lucy turned out to be Hans Yoder’s wife and the judge awarded her the possession of the artifact. She returned to sanity when she got her anti – schizophrenia medication restored and some minor treatment. She wept over Hans and the judge gave her ten years forced labor for missing her medication. But let her keep the relic, Lonely returned to the CHON asteroid where they found the first relic and found the other relics that were there. That was what made him famous and rich, the real end of it was when he donated the last three relics to the Smithsonian. He had trouble with the gravity and sat a lot during the presentation. But when the speaker told of The one sure scrap of evidence that we have been visited by non human intelligences. He sat bolt upright in his chair and spoke to the audience. He had gotten all the money and fame for being a co-discoverer of the first non-human artifacts, but he had never thought of them as such. He later explained that the speech came as a revelation that his name would go down in history. But really he was amazed that he had anything to do with the first non-human artifacts, and not just a woman in a shitty ships suit.

Summons

The year 2176 was a good one for the inhabitants of Earth. Hydrogen fusion had been developed and the reliance on the old Helium³ reactors was over. It would take a lot of time to convert wholly to Hydrogen but they still had a several thousand years of Helium³ on the moon. Exploration of the solar system was a priority since the easily used resources of the Earth had been used up and there were lots of resources off of Earth. To help with the discovery of resources several telescopes were built in 22st and 23nd Century. The crowning thrust of that effort was the Big Space Telescope in orbit near the Asteroid belt. It was a construct of several dozen mirrors, each ten or twenty kilometers in diameter, which allowed the telescope to focus out to almost a hundred light years. The Mirror Array was so powerful that the operators could focus on a planet out at a couple of dozen light years and see the cloud formations on the planet. The mechanisms that made it possible to turn and focus the telescope were unique to say the least. They used a combination of gimbaled gas jets and gyroscopes to maneuver it. The mirror cost so much that a consortium of businesses organized a congress to resolve any conflicts that arouse out of conflicts for its use. They also had to have several radars to sweep the area around the mirror to make sure that no piece of debris impacted on the surfaces of the mirrors. The mirrors were silver on a plastic backing, a small hole would not matter but the impact would impart spin on the mirrors and ruin a focus on a distant planet. And of course a hole that was too big would distort the mirror permanently. A meeting almost decided to move the telescope above the ecliptic plane. That would reduce the number of impacts on the mirror; unfortunately it would also remove the mirror from the resources that were used to repair them. A coin was flipped and they decided to leave the telescope where it was. The repairs were mostly automated and the telescope was an information warehouse for the inner asteroid belt. When the telescope turned it would usually flash its presence like a huge search light. It was visible to the Earth and most of the inner Asteroid belt. Many a subsequent prospector with a failed ship would cobble together a laser and signal the telescope over light minutes of space. Many of them were rescued and survived, almost as many died.

But that was the gamble the prospectors took. Every one heard of Lonely Martin. He found the I’scurza relic with his partner. The relic was non-human and pointed at the fact that while the Earth might not have been visited, the solar system certainly had been. And the real encouraging thing was that it became known that we weren’t alone any longer, the universe held more than the human race. That became the source of a hundred new novels and several movies. The points of view of the novels and movies varied but most of them urged the governments of Earth to go out and seek other races. The space telescope was planned to seek other races. The telescope would reach out fifty light years and (under the right circumstances) discern industry in a planets atmosphere. Some critics pointed out that as soon as a race could do it, they would move industry out into space. No pollution problems and abundant energy, low transportation costs and the workers could still be at home via telecommuting. But the people with the idea pointed out that despite the move of industry into orbit you could still see the lights of a city in the dark. That was a telling argument and the telescope was built and began to search. It intermingled the search for inhabited planets with actual research in space. But with several thousands of solar systems in the hundred light year range of the telescope the time it took to turn and focus the telescope became a critical value. The time it took to turn the telescope and to focus on the next solar system it was calculated that it would take at least 20 years to check out the nearby stars.

The serchers were encouraged in the 2160’s that a possible interstellar drive was discovered. By 2168 it was demonstrated and shown to work. But there was a draw back, the ship had to be traveling a significant fraction of the speed of light for it to work. In fact the faster the ship was traveling in normal space, the faster it traveled in Hyperspace when the drive was turned on. The theoretical maximum was the speed of light squared when the device was engaged at light speed in normal space. The engineers and scientists worked and worked to find a manageable way to get close to the speed of light.

But the next really significant development in 2176 was at the space telescope. It actually happened four years before, in 2172. It was during a turn of the telescope that a partial message was received via laser. The telescope did not react to lasers itself, but the sub mirrors were coordinated in a turn via lasers. The turning mechanism received the laser signal and called a halt to the turn (the error reported was unable to translate command). Inertia continued to turn while the array tried to unravel what the signal had been. The only reason that they found that out was because the mirrors were turned. That was a problem, there were thousands of laser messages at one time crisscrossing the solar system. Lasers were a good way to communicate at solar system distances because radio needed too much power. A radio that was that powerful would over shadow any other radio in the system. The message was recorded, and then analyzed for content. None was found; the nature of encoding of information was arbitrary. If you got a message in Urdu could you read it? Or if an Iranian got a message in English could he read it? The real puzzle was that the laser beam had come in from deep space not the inner system. But there was always something else to do. Short staffed the telescope communications people put the message away and forgot about it.

Things got busy for a time, the Brazil /Hispanic Union war flared up and then slowed and stopped. Almost a quarter of the personnel on the telescope were Brazilian with about the same amount of Hispanic Unionists. They obeyed the recall home and left the Array with half the personnel it needed. Peace was restored on Earth (more or less) and the population was under control at 14 billion people. The peace was controlled by international agreement, if a nation started a war they were not allowed to get any kind of agricultural aid from the international community. The hostile nations had to live with the amount of food they could grow on their own lands during the war. If they invaded or crossed a nation in their war they were fined for any food they ruined. There was just enough food grown on Earth to feed every human being. There were plans for Factory Farming and they did work with enough power. But it they could only grow so much and the limit was at hand. But other than that the world was a very nice place to live. When the wars let up the personnel returned to the telescope, some shame faced at their response to the recall. Other than that, things picked up and the two fractions said, Let bygones be bygones. To catch up a general purge of the records was ordered, including the communications records. One of the new personnel was Betty Espinosa; she was put in charge of clearing up the communications records.

Betty was a good-natured woman but a fanatic for the Telescope and everything to do with it This is important, important to the whole human race! We’re doing a service that will be called essential in the future! Most of the personnel at the Telescope felt the same thing if not in quite those terms. She attacked the records (there was no other term that would show her fever or conviction that she was doing work for the whole human race). She deleted giga bytes of old stale emails and stored and put to quantum well storage even more. She ran through Terra bytes information and then Pico Bytes of information. She developed an algorithm that saved the last email in a back in forth conversation. That way she had access to everything that had been said with out storing what she felt was repeated email. She came across the fragment and was on the point at throwing it away when she realized that the signal was base eight rather than base two or base 16 as most human communications were. After six months looking at the message she got another message of the same type. It was sent in the same wavelength and same frequency as the first message and was received when the Telescope was pointing in the same direction, as it had been the time before. The laser message was very attenuated and weak. Even a message from the Oort cloud would not have been that attenuated. She got together with a couple of the graduate physics students and had them calculate the distance that would be needed to make the laser signal that weak. The students laughed at the result, which was impossible, the results said at least forty light years. But the result was the same for both messages, over forty light years. Betty had done her graduate work on Lonely Martin. She felt an almost religious conviction that other intelligent life would be found in her lifetime. She felt thrilled that she had been instrumental in finding an extra terrestrial message. But her superiors felt differently. There were other explanations of why the laser might have looked like it came from that far away. Betty looked for further information to tie down the 40 light year theory. The others at the Telescope thought that Betty had a bug up her, and let her go.

This was one of the side effects of being out here like this. It manifested itself in several different ways. Some men needed a cup, in porcelain with their names in gold leaf and some kind of coat of arms on it. Some of them (male and female) exercised until they found some kind of excessively thin and muscular beauty in themselves.

There were several ways that the impulse manifested itself, Betty’s was considered harmless. She searched and fretted over what she found. Had there only been two messages? The lasers would only bounce off of the mirrors. But lasers coordinated the turns of the mirrors. Were there any records of turns that started for no reason? She looked and found six turns that were started for no reason. Not all of the mirrors had received these messages. All of them had started when the mirrors were pointed in the same direction that the message came from. That was what she listed as the first clue.

During that time the final improvements were made in the faster than light drive. A small ship carrying only two was tested and it made the hop to Alpha Centaury and back in a few days But mind, the British pilot said, You won’t get that kind of speed out of a ship that can carry a few hundred people. This thing is loaded with anti-matter and will get right up to the speed of light in no time. The bigger version still has the problem of getting up to speed and then engaging the drive. You’d have to use all of the energy that the solar system produces for the next dozen years to make enough anti-matter for that. The Spirit of Man was the ships name, and it was a compromise as all ships were. Some wanted speed, but then you’d arrive with less than the right amount of personnel. Others wanted their department represented and gave good reasons for the representation Life sciences is important, you won’t survive if you don’t have life sciences! That was true of course but then the Exo-Biology folks said Well what are you going for if not to get information about the life forms there? If you want information or you’re going to colonize or whatever you need to know about the life forms on any planet you find. That was true to, but everyone had their arguments and time just gave them what they needed to sharpen their arguments. Politicians started to rumble about making the decision for them but that brought everyone on the project together and sacrifices were made and bargains were struck and the ship’s personnel began to take shape. At the dawn of 2175 two more messages were received, the last one was the longest and Betty was hard pressed to keep her excitement to herself. She submitted the two messages to the general library on Friday and on Sunday she found that the communications console would not allow her to read them. She tried several things to regain access but nothing worked. At the end of a week a courier ship arrived with a squad of Marines and a Naval officer. Everyone knew that the International Intelligence Authority (IIA) monitored every bit of traffic on the Internet and the Wide Net as well. This was that kind of case, the Naval officer was a technical man, and he got the contents of the communications console and began to interrogate Betty. It was done well and Betty was only too glad to cooperate with the military. The Marines were happy to visit with the rest of the Telescope personnel (there were several good looking women there). Betty had put together her arguments for the last two years, now she spilled them out to the Lieutenant. For the first fifteen minutes Betty sounded like a high-speed recording. Conner, the Lieutenant tripped a recorder and made notes while she talked. By the time she was through she got the minor depression that had accompanied her recounting her ideas. That always happened, she felt that her arguments were obvious and trite, but Conner asked her to recount the ideas again and showed he had been listening closely to the ideas she had put forth. She happily retold the story and he continued to ask questions. In the end she asked What do you think about my theory?

Conner nodded Well that’s what I was sent here for, if they thought it was sky doodling they wouldn’t have paid this kind of attention would they? They left after a week and took Betty with them.

The IIA quizzed her several times in the next few days, despite her mania about the subject even she began to get tired of hearing herself repeat the theory. Finally she was escorted into the smallest room she had seen so far. There were three people there, two women and a man. They listened to a recounting of the idea and questioned her closely. Conner was there and helped Betty tell her tale. They had become very friendly (and eventually married) and he was very happy to help her with her story.

When she was through Betty asked Am I going to have to tell this theory again? To tell the truth I’m getting tired of it.

The oldest looking woman shook her head No Mz Espinosa, this is the final time you’ll be telling your story. Now you need to know something about what is happening.

She stood; she was very tall and thin, with gray hair. Betty wondered where she came from, with a little work you could stay looking thirty years old until you were well into your second century. She hadn’t bothered about it, no woman where she came from would have put out the effort to stay thin, mature women had some pudge on them. But the woman did not hear her thoughts and spoke softly to a controller and a picture sprang into focus on the wall. It showed a long narrow truncated cone, with what looked like a cup on the apex of the cone. This is the Spirit of Man, the first interstellar ship ever built. Built by us I should say. What you’ve done in the last few days has helped us determine the eventual destination of the first flight. The actual point of origin of the lasers is this system: HR 59Aa. Its fifty or so light years from Earth. We’ve changed the order of the Telescopes viewing and looked at the system. Normally we wouldn’t have looked at this system for another sixteen years. We also extended the time the Telescope will spend on that solar system to a full two weeks. We’ve already had reports that there are anomalies in the system. She touched a control and the scene changed to a starscape. Then rearranged itself to two more pictures tiled on the right of the screen with the reduced starscape on the left. The star looked dimmed somehow in the main picture. She turned back to Betty and said; See this? There are clouds obscuring the star. Look at this. She did something with the control and the upper righthand picture took the place of the one on the left See? This was taken a day later than the first one. The clouds of dust or whatever have changed and the sun’s spectral signature has also changed.

She did the thing again with the controller and the final lower right picture changed places with the main picture. The dust had moved again and there was a bright light at the top where the sun was not obscured. Conner shook his head and spoke to Betty If you had some kind of dust obscuring the solar object you shouldn’t have it change that quickly. It would change but over the course of a month or two. Betty did not care, the sight of the solar system as if from less than a light year was enthralling. The older woman continued, We don’t know why the laser message is incomplete. We have turned the messages over to the cryptographers in the IIA. They haven’t made any kind of progress and they have said that they don’t expect to. The encoding of the separate messages are so much different and then we don’t know the language either. And finally we don’t think that they’re complete, they’re only fragments of messages as far as we can see. The second woman said, There are tags between characters of the messages. We have found that the tags are not at the start of the messages or at the ends. That told the cryptographers that the messages are only fragments. There are different tags between video messages and we’re having more luck with the picture messages. Conner asked, So can we take it that the destination of the Spirit of Man is HR 59Aa? The older woman nodded As soon as the shake down cruse of the ship is complete we’re going to send them off. We were going to send a laser message, but at fifty light years there and the same back we’d have to be able to carry a conversation over a century between each question and answer. Betty thought about the pictures she had seen and asked about heat in the cloud. Yes, the dust is much too hot to be common dust. The woman looked around as if trying to see if anyone was listening and then nodded The techs tell me that there must be a reason for it.

Conner and Betty were sworn to secrecy and told to keep it quiet. The IIA did not want the public getting carried away with the idea of immediate contact with the putative aliens It will take the ship at least two years to get there and then a year to return. Then the ships crew will want at least a year to explore and establish relations with the inhabitants. So that’s four years and possibly another year. We can’t maintain the public’s interest for that long. We need to keep working on space. We can’t afford to let the public attitude change about that. And we have the example of the United States moon project as an example. They achieved what no one else had done and the public ignored it and the Agency fell into disrepute as the other federal organizations sent their dead wood there. We will not let that happen to us. So Conner and Betty were taken into the IIA and became privy to the other information that came out of the examination of HR 59Aa. The two weeks passed and the Telescope began to work on other stars. But every time in the next year that they happened to turn past the location of the HR 59Aa they paused and took more pictures. The Spirit of Man did its shakedown cruise and except for some plumbing problems came through with flying colors.

Now they had to select the crew for the first mission and that turned into a horrible headache. Since they already had an agency for the telescope they expanded their scope of duty and let them pick the people to go to HR 59Aa. There was room for a couple of hundred in the crew and there were over