— one T-minute costs most of a day in S-space, and nearly four Earth-years.”
Again Judith Niles turned to leave the room. Sy, after a final glance at the four cowled and motionless figures, followed her outside and along another long and dimly lit corridor. He noted approvingly that her energy and concentration remained undiminished.
They finally approached a massive metal door, protected against entry by locks that called for fingerprint, vocal, retinal, and DNA matching. When Sy was cleared by the system and stepped inside, he looked around him in surprise. He had expected something new and exotic, perhaps another frozen lab, full of strange experiments in time-slowing or suspension of consciousness; but this room appeared to be no more than a standard communications complex. And a dusty, poorly maintained one at that.
“Don’t judge by appearances.” Judith Niles had seen his expression. “This is the most important room in Gulf City. If there are any secrets, they’re here. And don’t think that human nature changes when people move to S- space. It doesn’t, and most individuals never question why things are done the way they are in our system. If they do question, they are shown what you are about to see. If not, we don’t force the information on them. This is the place where the oldest records are accessed.”
She sat down at the console and performed a lengthy coded entry procedure. “You should try cracking this, if you think you’re a hot-shot at finding holes in system software. It has six levels of entry protection. Let’s feel our way into the data base gradually. This is a good place to begin.”
She entered another sequence. The screen lit with the soft, uniform white glow characteristic of S-space. After a few moments there appeared on it a dark network of polyhedral patterns, panels joined by silvery filaments. “You’ve seen one of these yourself, I gather. Gossameres and Pipistrelles — possibly the first alien intelligence that humans discovered. We ran into them twenty thousand Earth-years ago, as soon as deep space probes began with S-space crews; but we’re still not sure if they possess true intelligence. Maybe it depends on our definition. Interesting?”
Sy shrugged in a noncommittal way.
“But not that interesting?” Judith Niles touched the control console again. “I agree. Abstractly interesting, but no more than that unless humans learn to set up a real dialog with them. Well, we have tried. We located their preferred output frequencies, and we found that simple signal sequences would drive them away and discourage them from draining our power supplies. But that’s not much of a message, and we never got beyond it. The Gossameres and Pipistrelles proved to be a kind of dead end. But they served one enormously important function. They alerted us to a particular wavelength region. We began to listen on those frequencies anytime we were in deep space and thought there might be a Gossamere around. And that’s when we began to intercept other signals on the same wavelengths — regular coded pulses of low-frequency radiation, with a pattern like this.”
On the screen appeared a series of rising and falling curves, an interlocking sequence of complex sinusoids broken by regularly spaced even pulses. “We became convinced they were signals, not just natural emissions. But they were faint and intermittent, and we couldn’t locate their sources. Sometimes, a ship on an interstellar transit would pick up a signal on the receiver, long enough for the crew to lock an imaging antenna onto the signal source direction. They might receive a faint source image for a while, then they would lose it as the ship moved on. It was tantalizing, but over the years we built up a library of partial, blurred images. Finally we had enough to plug everything into a computer and look for a pattern. We found one. The ‘sightings’ took place only near the midpoints of the trips, and only when the ships were far from all material bodies and signal sources. The signals were received only when we were in deep space — the deeper, the better.
“By then we knew we were seeing something different from Gossameres and Pipistrelles. The new sources were very faint and distant, and the reconstructed image outlines showed a hint of a spiral structure, nothing like those paneled polyhedra. But we were still too short of information. It seemed a fascinating scientific mystery, but not much more. That was when Otto Kermel proposed a series of missions for a long-term search and study of the objects. “I don’t claim or deserve any credit for what happened next. I thought his idea would go nowhere, and gave him minimal resources and support. He did all the pioneer work on his own. We gave him the use of a one- man ship, and he went away to a quiet location about seven light-years from Sol. He argued that the absence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields was essential to studying the objects. Although his first objective was communication with them, he found that a round-trip message to even the nearest of them took two S-years. That limited him, but during his studies he discovered lots of other things.
“First, he found many Kermel Objects, all around the Galaxy. The signals we intercept are not intended for us. We are eavesdroppers on transmissions between the Kermels, and those signals between them are numerous. Based on the length of those transmissions, Otto concluded that the Kermel Objects are immensely old, with a natural life-rate so slow that S-space is inadequate to study them — in thousands of Earth-years, he was receiving only partial signals. Otto claimed that he could partially decode their messages, and he believed that they have been in existence since the formation of the Universe — since before the Big Bang, according to one of his wilder reports. He also suggested that they propagate not by exchange of genetic material, but by radio exchange of genetic information. We have not been able to verify any of those conjectures, and Otto could not provide enough data for convincing proof. What he needed was the T-state, and a chance for more extended study periods on a time scale appropriate to the Kermel Objects. But by an accident of timing, he departed for a second expedition just before the T-state was discovered. And he has never returned.
“By the time he left, though, we had changed our ideas about the practical importance of studying the Kermel Objects. We decided that it is central to the future of the human species. We have continued his work, but without much of his data base. Take a look at this.”
Judith Niles projected another scene onto the display. “Does it seem familiar?” Sy studied it for a second or two, then shrugged. “It’s a picture of a spiral galaxy, looking down on the disk. I’ve no idea which one.”
“Correct. There’s no way you’d recognize it, but it’s this galaxy, seen from outside. That signal was recorded by Otto Kermel, from one of the Objects sitting way up above the galactic plane. And as part of the same signal, this image came with it.” At her keyed command, another picture overlaid the first one. It was the same galaxy, but now the star patterns were shown in different colors. “Keep watching closely. I’m going to zoom.”
The star fields expanded steadily as the field of view moved in to focus on one of the spiral arms. Soon individual stars could be distinguished on the screen. Judith Niles halted the zoom and moved the image to occupy one quadrant of the display. “Once you look at particular stars, you can see what’s going on. The stars in this image have been color-coded according to spectral type. And by looking at the stars in our own stellar neighborhood, it was easy for us to read the code. For instance, Sol is a G-2 V dwarf, and G-types show in pale green. Red giants are magenta, O-type supergiants are purple, and red dwarf stars are shown as orange-yellow.
“There is another important piece of information in this display. Stars don’t sit in fixed positions, they move relative to each other. So by looking at the configuration of stars in the main stellar clusters, you can determine the date of an image. All the evidence was consistent, and told us that this image represented the situation as it was nine hundred thousand Earth-years ago. When Otto Kermel received another signal of the same type, he thought at first that it was just a copy. But it wasn’t. Here it is.”
She brought another image on the screen, placing it in a second quadrant of the display. “For one thing, you can see that the star positions are different. This shows the stellar distribution at a different date. It is still our local arm of the galaxy, but as it was six hundred thousand Earth-years ago. Now watch closely.”
Yet another image appeared in a third quadrant.
“Here’s one which we date at a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Take a good look at all three — they are the most important pictures in human history.” Sy stared at the screen in silence for a couple of minutes. “Can you display the color key for spectral type again?” he said at last.
Without speaking, Judith Niles flashed a color code onto the screen header. Sy was silent for an even longer period.
“Where’s Sol?” he finally asked.
Judith Niles smiled grimly, and moved the screen cursor to indicate a green star in the field. “That’s Sol, as it was a hundred and fifty thousand years ago; just as it has been for the past few billion years, and as it is today, and as it ought to be a billion years from now.”
Sy nodded. “It hasn’t changed. But you can see there have been changes in the spectral types of other stars. Far too many of them, and far too fast. Stellar evolution is a very slow process.”
“Exactly. And all the changes have been taking place in one direction. I only showed you the situation for three different times, but we have others. We can use them to extrapolate forward. Here” — a new image occupied
