up the cue from Gantt. There was a general chuckle. “The sidereal time would normally indicate an extraterrestrial source. That seems outlandish in this context, but I guess we should kick it around. I deduce we’re under attack by an extraterrestrial army stationed on Alpha Cancri aiming tachyonic Earthquake beams at us.” The chuckles turned to guffaws. Isaacs smiled wryly, recalling his own fatigued fantasy.
Noldt asked, “How about a Jupiter effect? Is there an alignment of planets that would cause a tidal or some other effect that would be associated with a fixed direction in the sky?”
“Jupiter effect?” Isaacs queried and Gantt turned to answer him.
“The Jupiter effect is supposed to be a terrestrial upheaval associated with an alignment of the great planets every two hundred years. One version has it that this alignment causes solar storms that eject particles affecting the polar atmosphere. Associated changes in air pressure are supposed to trigger Earthquakes.”
“I don’t believe any of that,” Gantt went on, “and have even more difficulty seeing how it could enter here. The regular tides should swamp any such effect. I suppose this might be a resonance of some kind, but it would have to be completely unprecedented.”
“Where’s Jupiter now?” asked Runyan. “Would you have noticed a change due to its motion over the time base you have?”
Isaacs deferred to Danielson. “Jupiter is about forty degrees away from the direction we’re talking about,” Danielson replied. “That may not mean anything if a resonance is involved. A preferred direction that’s a mean of the Moon and the Sun and Jupiter might be involved. Over the last three months, the Earth has moved far enough to rule out a preferred direction with respect to the Sun, but Jupiter moves more slowly. I’m not sure we could rule that out.”
“Jupiter would have moved through two or three degrees,” Runyan stated, having done a quick mental calculation.
“That’s a shift of over a hundred miles along the Earth’s surface,” Danielson replied. “If that’s the case, we can just about eliminate the possibility of alignment of the trajectory we see with the position of Jupiter.”
Runyan continued thinking out loud. “The twenty-three degree angle of the Earth’s equator with respect to the ecliptic is purely random—there’s no other solar system or astronomical connection—ruling out the accidental location of Polaris. A fixed angle of thirty-three degrees with respect to the Earth’s equator means even less. This thing has to be basically terrestrial. And yet sidereal. I’ll put it back to Ellison. What the hell?”
“How do you know the Russians aren’t behind this somehow?” Leems asked. “It seems like some kind of beam technology could be involved, and they invented the techniques. A satellite could be rigged to fire at a precise point in orbit so that it would look as if it always fired from the same position with respect to the stars. As Alex just 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 defense.
“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 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 Phillips. 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 cliches 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 that 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 behavioral 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. “I think Carl 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 beamed 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 that 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 flinched involuntarily. Fletcher stopped squinting through the sight.
“Maybe a neutrino beam?”
