said, terrestrial, but sidereal. They might do such a thing just to throw us off the mark. I point out that the eighty minute period you report is very close to the time for a satellite to orbit the earth.'
'That's short, though, Harvey ,' said Runyan. 'A satellite takes closer to ninety minutes.'
'Use an array of satellites then.' He turned to Isaacs.
'You have checked the location of Russian satellites, haven't you?'
'No, that hadn't occurred to me -'
'I'm sure you'll remedy that oversight at the first opportunity, ' Leems interrupted.
Isaacs gritted his teeth and Danielson came to his defence.
'But that doesn't make any sense,' she said. 'Why would they use any such weapon on their own ship? And wouldn't we know if they had some technique for generating seismic tremors deep inside the earth?'
'I don't suppose we know everything the Russians are up to,' said Leems with a patronizing tone. 'Perhaps they shot their own ship to embroil us in the very scandal you alluded to.'
Danielson leaned slowly back in her chair, her face flushed. Isaacs shook his head slowly.
Quiet fell on the group momentarily, then Fletcher spoke. 'Alex, you were joking a while ago, but it got me thinking.' He looked around at his colleagues. 'Apparently, none of us can propose a natural explanation to account for the evidence presented: the seismic signals, the sonar signals, the suggestion that something is boring small holes through the earth itself. I can't buy Harvey 's suggestion that it is some Russian plot. There are too many weird aspects. I think we must seriously consider another possibility. Suppose that we aren't dealing with either a natural or a man-made phenomenon?' A deep silence filled the room. 'Suppose there is a, well, an external intelligence behind this?'
The silence continued as Fletcher's words probed a queasy, sensitive spot in each member of Jason. Trained as scientists, they sought to explain the world around them with the simplest rational extension of previous knowledge, but each knew their knowledge had bounds, limits. Each knew the rules of the game could be changed and their carefully honed intuition would be of little use. Each looked for and craved a simple solution, but each knew there was a chance, however small, that Fletcher could be right. They could be facing a situation so fundamentally different than anything they had encountered previously that their training and experience could be meaningless.
'Are you suggesting that there's an extraterrestrial intent behind these occurrences?' asked Plumps. His tone was incredulous. There were mutterings of dissatisfaction around the room.
'None of us here are UFO fanatics,' pressed Fletcher, 'least of all me. But we all know you can't prove a negative; we can't prove other intelligent civilizations don't exist. We know there are a few standard clichй concerning how such civilizations are to be discovered, radio emissions and all that. But I convinced myself long ago that guessing at the character of an extraterrestrial civilization by extrapolating the human condition is an exercise in futility. We have no basis for estimating the sociological and cultural evolution of an alien society even if we all obey the same physics.
'All I want to do is to raise the possibility. If we can rationally rule it out, or develop a preferred alternative, then so be it.'
'It doesn't make sense,' proclaimed Ted Noldt. 'If there were an intelligence at work, we should be able to discern a purpose. What we've heard about here, holes drilled through ships, is no benign attempt at communication. It's certainly not overwhelmingly destructive either, an overt act of aggression. What could the purpose possibly be?'
'That's just my point,' retorted Fletcher. 'You're not asking a question of physics, but one of motivation. I submit we're unlikely to fathom any but the most transparent of motives — as you said, peaceful communication or war. The true possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. Suppose they're prospecting? Suppose we're seeing the effect of some probe and our existence here is totally immaterial to them? We could be like an anthill which is accidentally in the way of a geologist's test well as he searches for oil. Your first reaction was to think they must be for us or against us. Maybe they don't give a damn.
'Or maybe it's a test,' Fletcher continued, trying to think of unorthodox possibilities. 'Maybe we're dealing with a bunch of extraterrestrial behavioural psychologists who just want to provoke us in a certain way and study our reactions.' Fletcher looked from man to man, defensive but determined to make his point.
'How can we possibly know what their purpose is? I certainly don't.'
Ellison Gantt then spoke up. 'l. think earl feels backed into a corner. Let me take a different tack. I agree with him that we should at least consider this possibility, and that an attempt to fathom motives may be premature. Suppose we assume for the moment that some influence is being boomed at us from a fixed point in space. Is there any way to determine what that influence is and where it's coming from? Could it be something with which we are basically familiar, like a laser or a particle beam?'
'I can speak to that. In fact, I'd been mulling over that very question,' said Vladimir Zicek, his speech hissing with East European sibilants. 'Any orthodox beam device would have a different signature than what has been described here. That is, one can imagine boring a hole from one side of the earth to the other with an exceedingly powerful beam, but one of the characteristics of the present phenomenon is that for half the cycle it goes from north to south, but on the other half it proceeds in the opposite direction. No external beam can do that. A beam must always propagate away from its source.'
'Hmmm, perhaps not a beam in that sense then,' said Fletcher thoughtfully. 'What if some focusing principle is involved? A diffuse source of energy which is brought to a concentrated focus along a certain path. Maybe the source of energy isn't along the line of the trajectory, but transverse to it.'
Fletcher lifted an imaginary rifle to his shoulder and strafed back and forth a few times. Several of those along his line of sight lunched involuntarily. Fletcher stopped squinting through the sight.
'Maybe a neutrino beam?'
There were several loud voices raised in simultaneous assent and dissent. A general hubbub ensued.
Wayne Plumps sensed that it was necessary to assimilate all that they had heard and called for quiet.
'Perhaps this is a good time to take a break for refreshments, ' he said. 'Let's resume our deliberations in half an hour.'
Against a rising background of chatter, the group stood, filed into the hall and down the stairs to a room where coffee, tea, and some cookies were set out.
Phillips escorted Isaacs and Danielson as they queued up. He made a small ceremony of preparing a cup of coffee for Danielson, ensuring she had the desired ingredients, a couple of cookies, and a napkin. She thanked him and then moved off by herself, motivated partly by a desire to be alone to contemplate the afternoon's developments and partly by a suspicion that Isaacs and Plumps would appreciate a chance to converse privately. She stood by a window looking over the parking lot and the playing field beyond, cradling her cup and saucer and munching on the cookies.
'That's crazy,' she heard Leems's voice rising disdainfully over the chatter. 'All the more reason to look to satellites in orbit, one to fire one direction, and another to fire a return shot in the opposite direction. That would solve Zicek's objection.'
A bit later she made out Runyan in a more conversational tone.
' — good idea, Carl, couldn't hurt to have astronomers look in that direction. Very deep photographs taken with telescopes on Mauna Kea and in Chile. Who knows what we might see. Maybe I'll call some friends, see what they can do.'
Runyan, speaking to earl Fletcher and Ted Noldt, lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level.
'In fact, the first step is to make sure I have the precise coordinates.'
He winked at them and crossed over towards where Danielson was standing, his thongs flapping on the floor.
Fletcher leaned over to whisper to Noldt.
'Doesn't take him long, does it?'
Noldt smiled into his coffee and shook his head.
As Runyan approached her, Danielson finished her last cookie and wiped her fingers awkwardly on the napkin which she held under the saucer. The gesture attracted Runyan's eyes to her waist where she held the cup. Out of habit, his gaze continued down her legs and then back past her breasts to her face which was in profile to him. Taking pleasure from the innocent voyeurism, he stopped at arm's length from her.
'A pretty little problem you've posed for us here.'
