 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
 |
Home • ThinkDifferentStore • MacBoards • Advertising • RSS Syndication • Newsletter • Contact | |
|
|
|
|
|
April 22nd, 2002
1
Diane and I were having a quiet Sunday night dinner at Blake's Steakhouse in San Jose. I was about ready to dig into a fourteen ounce New York Strip and a glass of Pinot Noir when I recognized someone who was entering the restaurant. I spoke in low tones to Diane.
"We have a visitor. An old friend."
"Who?" Diane turned a little to look.
"The butt head astronomer. Will Pattersen."
"Oh, man. Does he see us?"
"He's heading right toward us."
In a moment Will Pattersen was standing over us looking, as usual, somewhat perplexed and nervous. "Max! Diane! How nice to see you again."
"How did you find us?" I scowled a little. My steak was getting cold.
"Brad McGovern said you might be here." He shrugged and smiled defensively.
Brad McGovern is a friend, a U.S. Attorney up in The City, and he knows my habits all too well. "Well, don't just stand there. Have a seat." Will grabbed a chair from an empty table, swung it around and straddled it, resting his chin on the back rest. I started cutting my steak. "I thought you were in a witness protection program." One can dream, right?
"I talked them out of it. It wasn't easy. I explained how many years it takes to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics and then become accomplished in the field. I turn 40 this summer. You don't just walk away from something like that and become an accountant in Kansas City. So they watched me for awhile and nothing has happened."
"So what brings you here tonight?"
"I have been doing some interesting work the last year. It's been very intense. Now I'm ready to publish the results, but I'm worried about what will happen after the paper is published. I think I might need some, um, protection."
I groaned silently to myself and looked at Diane. She raised her eyebrows slightly, and I could tell from the twinkle in her eyes that she was on the edge of laughter. "And why would that be?" I asked.
Will inched the chair closer to us and spoke in a quiet, hushed voice. "I can prove that human beings are alone in the Milky Way galaxy. At least this side of it. I think there may be people who won't want to accept that conclusion. Powerful people. I'm worried about Rachel and I want someone to look after her."
"We don't do body guard work," I said flatly.
"What about Manuel? He's pretty cool."
"Manuel is in Afghanistan with the Rangers."
Will squinched up his face a little. "You guys are the only ones I trust. What can I do?"
Diane turned to Will. "You could sit on the paper for awhile. Besides, I don't think you can prove what you say."
"Oh, but I can. That's the scary part about it. It's an important finding, and I must publish the results."
"Like I said, we don't do body guard work. But I have a friend who does. His name is Ken Wu. He has a 5th degree black belt in Kenpo and military experience. He's not cheap. Diane and I will consult with you, for a small fee, introduce you to Ken, but Ken would have to do the leg work. Want me to contact him?"
Long pause. "Okay. If you recommend him, that's good enough for me."
"Tell me about your paper," Diane asked, picking at her salad. She was avoiding eye contact, I could tell, or she would lose it.
"I can't. I mean. Um. It's better if we wait until it's published. Okay? I have to leave now. You'll call me right? About Ken? Here's my numbers." He pulled out a wrinkled business card and slid it towards me.
"Yeah, I'll have Ken call you. Assuming he's not decisively engaged."
Will got up without commenting and slid the chair back to the other table. He seemed to be in daze as he walked out and absently bumped into several people. As soon as I looked back towards Diane, I heard plates crash. I couldn't bear to look, so I stared at Diane with squinted eyes, and she started laughing so hard, she had to cover her mouth. In a second, she had her head down on the table, resting her face on her forearm. I was not so amused.
My steak was cold.
The next morning was Monday, March 4th. I was in the kitchen getting ready to make bacon and eggs. We had slept in on a lazy, foggy morning and it was almost ten. Diane was still in the shower, so I started squeezing some orange juice. The phone rang. The caller ID said Berkeley. It was Will.
"Max? Max. I have a new problem. My computer's hard disk has been erased. Completely."
"Was it an accident?"
"Not possible. I lock my office before I go home every evening. It was fine last Friday night. Someone has messed with it. The papers on my desk have been rifled."
"Do you have a backup?"
"Yeah. I copy everything important to a ZIP once a week and leave it at home. I still have what I need to publish."
"Okay," I said. "Why don't you go get your ZIP and bring it over here. I'll ask Ken to come over and introduce you. We'll figure out what to do."
Just as I hung up, Diane walked into the kitchen. She was wearing that famous white terry cloth bathrobe, the short one that barely covers her hips. Her blonde hair haloed her face and hung down, curly and tousled almost to her breasts. I struggled to remember what I was making for breakfast.
Ken Wu arrived first, about noon. I met him at the gate, and we walked to the pool-side chairs. Ken is a very large fellow, not as tall as I am but stockier. Maybe 250 pounds. We met at the Karate school I go to; he's the head instructor, the instructor of my own instructor who is merely a 3rd degree black belt. Ken was born in Okinawa but has lived in California for all of his adventured 33 years. We have been spending a lot of time together.
I filled him in on Dr. Pattersen, starting with the SETI at home adventure last summer. Ken took it all in, and then sat back, gazing at the sky. The fog was clearing. "This astronomer. He's nuts. He lost his daughter last summer and almost got you killed several times. Now he wants to publish another bombshell? Geez, Max. I don't know about this. I don't have your connections. Or Manuel to cover my back."
"We'll work together. With Manuel gone, I can really use your help."
"What's this guy to you?"
"We like him, in a twisted kind of way. And we like his wife, Rachel. Neither Diane nor I want to see anything happen to them. If I'd been on the ball, maybe his daughter Mandy would still be alive. Listen. Let's hear his story when he comes over. Then we'll make a final decision, okay?"
"It better be good. Anyway. How about some of that great lemonade Diane makes?"
"You bet." I paused. Thinking about Mandy sobered me. "By the way, do you still carry that Colt Python?"
"Everywhere. But it's in the car."
"If you take this job, you should start carrying."
"Sheesh," Ken grunted.
Just about then, the alarm sounded and I saw Will peering through the gate. It was nearly one in the afternoon. I took Will inside, and we all gathered in Diane's computer lab, sitting around her large wooden work table. After introductions, I kicked things off. "Will, I know you said last night that you weren't ready to talk about your paper. But we have some concerns. Last summer, things got kinda nasty, and Ken has some concerns about working with us. So you're just gonna have to spill the beans and tell us what's going on. Otherwise, it'll be really hard to help you. Okay? Start at the beginning."
Will slouched back and brought his hand up to his mouth. He rubbed his chin for a second. "Okay. But you have to promise that this goes no further until I publish." We all nodded. "Here goes. Last summer I started thinking about how we search for extraterrestrial signals. You know? It all started with the Fermi Paradox. Back about 1950, Enrico Fermi asked The Question. If planets form and life evolves naturally and develops technology, then there should be many civilizations in our galaxy. Some just forming, some very advanced. Trouble is, we can't find them. We've been searching with ever more sophistication, and every astronomer is beginning to ask the same question Fermi did: "Where are they?"
"Maybe they've decided not to advertise," Diane jumped in. "Could be dangerous to send out signals."
"Yeah, I know. But even when you're not trying to advertise with coded, intelligent signals, you still end up radiating. Think about all the high powered military radars, megawatts, that have been tracking satellites for years. And radio signals from TV stations. There's a wave front emanating from Earth that has a radius of about sixty light years. Sooner or later, after thousands of years we should pick up something from older civilizations. But nada. It's spooky quiet out there after almost a million CPU years of SETI data processing.
"A million years?" Ken gasped.
"Right," Will continued. "About three million volunteers from all over the planet have donated time on their PCs for the past several years. The collective CPU time amounts to 954,000 CPU years. And yet, even though we haven't covered the complete envelope of channels, frequencies and sky coordinates, statistically, we should have picked up something by now. So I got to thinking that maybe a technical civilization doesn't radiate very long in the electromagnetic spectrum. Perhaps they find another way to communicate. Or perhaps they decide to go exploring themselves.
"So here's what I did. I started to look for accelerating mass. We learned how to do that with Pulsar signals disrupted by late forming planets. I carried it one step further. Look at it this way. An accelerating mass produces gravitons. The so-called gravitational wave. Those are very hard to detect. But gravitons couple to the photons produced by Pulsars. And that coupling can be detected. So my students and I started a sky survey using a very long baseline interferometric technique..."
"Whoa, you just lost me," I grinned.
"Just hang on. It'll all come together. By looking at the current pulses from Pulsars all over the sky and comparing the results over time, we can detect the graviton-photon coupling and form a map in the sky of all the accelerating mass. You can't even use a super computer cluster. It takes a grid computer, a month of processing to take all that data and construct maps of accelerated mass.
"And what we saw was all kinds of interesting things. Jets of accelerated gas from black holes, expanding matter from novae, even volcano eruptions from Jupiter's Io. But every time we pointed an optical or radio telescope at one these masses, we found an astronomical body. What we didn't find was any small masses that weren't radiating. Like, um, space ships."
"Just a minute," Diane said. "Wouldn't those be too small to detect?"
"Not really. We calculated that if there were a mass of at least 1500 metric tons accelerating at about one gee within 25,000 light years, we'd detect it. But, again, we found nothing. That leads me to believe that not only is nobody radiating, but no one is traveling around. At least on this side of the galaxy."
"Maybe they're using hyperspace, or something like that," I grinned. I watch Star Trek too.
"But that's not science," Will continued, winking at me. "I see you have a pool out there. Suppose you look into a swimming pool. You use your eyes and infrared optics to look for body heat. The pool is empty. What do you conclude? You conclude there are no bodies in the pool. To suggest that they are hidden or that there are ghosts swimming in the pool is something, but it isn't science."
Diane looked puzzled. "Hang on there, Will. Suppose I live on an island in the pacific. I live in a primitive tribe that knows nothing about commercial airliners. Every day I look up and see nothing. Can I conclude that my tribe is alone on Earth?"
"Well, you're right," Will laughed. "That's the limit of your science: your naked eye. But the right approach is to build a radar and look for airliners cruising along at 35,000 feet. To simply fantasize about unknown creatures flying around in the sky is unproductive. So here's the logic. We're beginning to get a better picture of the galaxy. We have some pretty good, um, tribal radars. Nobody's radiating to any significant degree. The solar systems we've discovered so far are very weird. Not well architected like ours to protect inner rocky, water planets in the Goldilocks zone. And nobody's traveling through space. The accumulation of facts begins to explain the Fermi Paradox. The reason we haven't been visited is because ... because, well, we're alone. Planets may be common, but the conditions for life may be such that a civilization like ours occurs only a few times in a galaxy. Maybe only once."
"Why do you think that's such a dangerous idea," Diane asked. "And what's the Goldilocks zone?"
"Goldilocks zone. Not too hot. Not too cold. Anyway, it's a dangerous idea because once it becomes a mainstream idea that we're alone, that SETI at home has found nothing and that graviton maps have found nohing, then those people who have a lot at stake pushing for space exploration will be very upset. They'll be afraid that we'll all get complacent and just muddle along on this planet until we get hit by a comet. Or kill ourselves off. Exploration as a human imperative will die. Power and influence will be lost. NASA won't like that. A lot of people won't like that.
"Least of all, the UFO magazines," Ken added, grinning.
"Yeah, them too, " Will chuckled. "So, if it's okay with you, can we use your computer to upload my paper to the Astrophysical Journal? I don't want to risk trying to mess with my computer at work. It might be sabotaged or have a virus that'll erase this ZIP."
"You are certainly paranoid," Diane said, amused. "Is the document already formatted?"
"Yep. It's in AASTeX 5.0 format. Ready to go."
Ken and I walked out into the kitchen and poured ourselves some more lemonade from the pitcher on the counter. "What do you think?" I asked.
"I think he's even crazier than you described him. I can't believe anyone would take this very seriously."
"We had the same reaction last summer. Big science these days is big money. And jobs. And power. Will has a knack for threatening the status quo."
"I see what you mean."
"So you'll watch over him? And Rachel?"
"For a little while."
"Okay, How about if you go with him back home and stay in Will's guest room. Diane and I will bring your car over later. It'll make him feel better."
"So long as I don't get any more astronomy lectures. Geez. That guy makes my head hurt."
I had some other business to finish up, and Diane was working on one of her computers. Will and Ken had been gone for about an hour when my cell phone rang.
"Max?"
"Yep."
"It's Ken. There's been a little accident."
"Oh, shit." Why did I know this was coming so soon?
"We were on 680, north of Danville, almost home. I was in the back seat. A pickup started to pass us, then slowed and rammed us from the side. Will almost lost control, but pulled it out. I opened the rear window and saw the guy yank on the steering wheel with his left hand and come at us again. Then he raised his right arm and I saw a weapon fire. Will's window glass shattered, but the bullet missed. Will was screaming. I fired four rounds at the guy. Two hit him in the head. Will braked and the pickup careened off the road in front of us and crashed into the trees."
"Did you stick around?"
"Yeah. Too many witnesses. Will stopped the car, and I went over to check out the driver. No ID. Nothing. Completely clean. Truck too. Asian guy. Young. The police are just starting to show up. We may be tied up here for quite awhile. I'll call you later when things settle down." He hung up.
I walked into Diane's computer lab, suddenly feeling cold, and rubbed my shoulder where the FBI agent who had tried to kill me in Vasilly Tupov's office last summer just missed. Thanks to Diane.
She was hunched over the display poring over some kind of computer code. "Perl" I think she called it. She turned around on her swivel chair when she heard me approach. "Well, Diane. It's started. All over again."
Previous adventures of Max Hadron:
The Case of the Extraterrestrial Redirect (June 10, 2001)
The Case of the Paperless Portfolio (Nov 12, 2000)
The Case of the GoogolPlex Smackdown (June 25, 2000)
The Case of the WWDC Murder (June 13, 2000)
Copyright 2002 by John
Martellaro, All rights reserved. Quantum Threads banner
artwork by Tracy Haynes. This is a work of fiction. All
people, places, entities, and events are the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business
establishments, events or locales is entirely
coincidental.
About the Author
John Martellaro lives in Colorado at 2,800 meters above sea level with a Ph.D. wife and two cats, Nikki and Data. He holds a B.S. in Astrophysics and an M.S. in Physics. His hobbies, include amateur astronomy, downhill skiing, bicycling, and listening to piano solos. His personal Macs are a B&W G3/400 with a flat screen Studio Display and a TiBook.
Server Racks
Online:  |
"
Cool Mac Gear
• iPod 1G-2G
• iPod 3G
• iPod 4G
• iPod Mini
• PowerBook-iBook
• Keyboard Skins
• Garageband