Читать книгу The Last Theorem - Frederik Pohl - Страница 14

The place where Astronomy 101 was given wasn’t a regular classroom. It was one of the rooms that were designed like miniature theaters, with curved rows of seats enough for a hundred students. Almost every seat was occupied, too, right down to the level that held a desk, a chair, and a lecturer who didn’t look to be much older than Ranjit himself. His name was Joris Vorhulst. He was obviously a Burgher, and it was almost as obvious that he had chosen to leave the island for his graduate schooling.

The schools he had gone to impressed Ranjit, too. They were hallowed names for astronomers. Dr. Vorhulst had got his master’s at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where he had interned on the vast old Keck telescopes, and he’d gone on to his doctorate at Caltech, with a side order of working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. At JPL he had been part of the team that ran Faraway, the spacecraft that had flown by Pluto into the Kuiper Belt—or into the rest of the Kuiper Belt, as Vorhulst would say, because he was loyal to the old profession-wide decision that had stripped Pluto of its claim to true planethood, so that now it was just one more of the countless millions of Kuiper snowballs. (Actually, Vorhulst told the class, Faraway had gone pretty much all the way through the Kuiper Belt by now and was already taking aim at the nearer fringes of the Oort cloud.)

Vorhulst went on to explain what all those unfamiliar (at least to Ranjit) things were, and the boy was fascinated.

And then, when the class was nearly over, Vorhulst gave them some good news. Everyone in the class, he announced, would have the privilege of looking through Sri Lanka’s best telescope at the observatory on the slopes of Piduruthalagala. “A really neat two-meter reflector,” he said. And then he added, “It was a present from the government of Japan, replacing a smaller one they’d given us earlier.” That got a smattering of applause from the students, but that was nothing compared to what they did when he said, “Oh, and by the way, my computer password is ‘Faraway.’ You’re all welcome to use it to access any astronomical material on the Web.” Then there were actual cheers, among the loudest the ones that came from the Sinhalese boy in the seat next to Ranjit. And when the professor looked at the timer on the wall and said the remaining ten minutes could be used for questions, Ranjit was one of the first to have a hand up. “Yes,” Vorhulst said, looking at the identifying board on his desk, “Ranjit?”

Ranjit stood up. “I’m just wondering if you’ve ever heard of Percy Molesworth.”

“Molesworth, eh?” Vorhulst shaded his eyes to get a better look at Ranjit. “Are you from Trincomalee?” Ranjit nodded. “Yes, he’s buried there, isn’t he? And yes, I have heard of him. Did you ever look up his crater on the moon? Go ahead. ‘Faraway’ will give you access to the JPL page.”

That was precisely what Ranjit did, the minute the class was over. He quickly located Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the World Wide Web on the rank of computers in the hall and downloaded a splendid image of the lunar crater named Molesworth.

It was indeed impressive, nearly two hundred kilometers across. Though an almost flat plain, its interior was dotted with a dozen genuine meteor-made craters, including one with a magnificent central peak. Ranjit thought of his visits to Molesworth’s grave in Trincomalee with his father. How nice it would have been to let his father know that he had seen the lunar crater for himself. But to do that seemed impossible.

The rest of Ranjit’s courses, naturally, were nowhere near as interesting as Astronomy 101. He’d signed up for anthropology because he’d expected it would be easy for him to get through without actually thinking much about it. As it developed, it was easy, although the other salient fact about it, as Ranjit learned, was that it was very nearly terminally tedious. And he’d signed up for psychology because he’d wanted to hear more about this GSSM syndrome. But in the first session the teacher informed him that he didn’t believe in GSSM, no matter what some other professor in some other class might say. (“Because if multitasking made you stupid, how would any of you ever manage to graduate?”) Finally, he was taking philosophy because it looked like the kind of thing you could bluff your way through without the necessity of a lot of studying.

There he had been wrong. Professor de Silva was a devotee of the practice of giving spot quizzes almost every week. That would have been tolerable enough, perhaps, but Ranjit quickly also learned that the professor was the kind who required his classes to memorize dates.

For a while Ranjit tried to take an interest in the subject. Plato was not a total waste of time, he thought, nor Aristotle. But when Professor de Silva began getting up to the Middle Ages, with Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas and all those people, things got worse. Ranjit did not really care about the difference between epistemology and metaphysics, or whether God existed, or what “reality” really was, exactly. So his flicker of interest flickered a bit more and then went out.

But, wonderfully, the joy of exploring Sol’s other worlds kept getting better and better. Especially when, in the second session, Dr. Vorhulst got into the possibilities of actually visiting some of the planets, at least perhaps one or two of the least forbidding ones.

Vorhulst ran through the list for them. Mercury, no; you would hardly want to go there because it was far too hot and dry, even though there did appear to be some water—actually, ice—at one pole. Venus looked to be even worse, wrapped in that carbon dioxide blanket that trapped heat. “The same kind of blanket,” Vorhulst told the class, “that is causing the global warming right here on Earth that I hope we may actually, one day, escape. Or at least the worst parts of it.” On Venus, he added, those “worst parts” had added up to a surface temperature that would melt lead.

Next out was the Earth, “which we don’t actually need to colonize anymore,” Vorhulst joked, “because apparently someone, or something, did already, a good long time ago.” He didn’t give them a chance to react to that but went right on: “So let’s look at Mars. Do we want to visit Mars? More interesting, is there life there? That argument went back and forth for years.” The American astronomer Percival Lowell, he said, had thought not only that there was life on Mars but that it was a highly civilized, massively technological kind of life, capable of building the enormous network of canals Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed on its surface. Better telescopes—with the help of the late Captain Percy Molesworth of Trincomalee—ruined that idea when it was established that Schiaparelli’s “canali” were only random markings that his eye had tricked him into linking into straight lines. Then the first three Mariner missions ended that debate by sending back pictures of a surface that was arid, cratered, and cold. “But,” Dr. Vorhulst finished, “better photographs of the surface of Mars since then have shown indications of actual flowing water. Not flowing anymore now, of course, but pretty definitely real water that did flow sometime in the past. So the life-on-Mars people were riding high again. But,” he added, “then the pendulum swung back. So which way is right?” Dr. Vorhulst swept the audience with his glance, then grinned. “I think the only way we’ll know is to send some people there, preferably with a lot of digging equipment.”

He paused. Then he said, “I guess your next question is, ‘What would they be digging for?’ But before I answer that, do any of you know of a place in the solar system that we have left out so far?”

Silence for a moment while a hundred students counted on their fingers—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—until a young woman in the front row called, “Are you talking about the moon, Dr. Vorhulst?”

He glanced at his finder plate for her name, then tipped her a salute. “Right on, Roshini. But before we get to the moon let me show you some pictures of a place I’ve actually been to, namely, Hawaii.”

He turned to the wall screen behind him, which had begun to display a nighttime shot of a dark hillside running down to the sea. The slope was dotted with splotches of red fires, like the campsite of an army, and where the splotches reached the shoreline there were violent pyrotechnics with fiery meteors flying above the surface.

“That’s Hawaii,” Vorhulst said. “The big island. The volcano Kilauea is erupting, and what you see is its lava flowing into the sea. As it flows along, each little stream begins to cool on the outside, and so it forms a sort of a pipe of hardened stone that the liquid lava flows on through. Only, sometimes the lava breaks through the pipe. Then you see these isolated patches of red-hot lava shining out.” He gave the class time to wonder why they were looking at Hawaii when the subject had ostensibly been the moon. Then he touched his controller again. Now the screen displayed Dr. Vorhulst himself along with a rather good-looking young woman in a skimpy sunsuit. They were standing at the entrance to what looked like an overgrown cave in the middle of a tropical rain forest.

“That’s Annie Shkoda there with me,” Vorhulst told the class. “She was my thesis adviser in Hilo—and don’t get any ideas, because about a month after that picture was taken she married somebody else. What we’re just about to go into there is what Americans call the Thurston Lava Tube. I prefer the Hawaiian name, which is Nahuku, because actually the man named Thurston that the other name comes from had nothing to do with the tube. He was just a newspaper publisher who campaigned for creating the Volcanoes National Park. Anyway, what happened was that maybe four or five hundred years ago Kilauea—or possibly the earlier volcano, Mauna Loa—was in eruption. It poured out lava; the lava formed tubes. When the lava stopped flowing, the liquid stuff ran out of the tubes. But the tubes remained as great big pipes of rock. Over time they got covered up with mud and dirt and God knows what, but they were still there.” He paused, looking up at the rows of students. “Anyone care to guess what this has to do with the moon?” Twenty hands went up at once. Vorhulst picked the boy next to Ranjit. “Yes, Jude?”

The boy stood up eagerly. “There were volcanoes on the moon, too.”

The professor nodded. “You bet there were. Not very recently, because the moon is so small it cooled off long ago. But we can still see where there were humongous ones, where the basaltic lava flows still cover hundreds of square kilometers, and there are plenty of domes on the moon—on the plains or actually inside a crater—that are probably volcanic in origin. And if there are flows and domes, there was lava, and if there was lava, there was what?”

“Lava tubes!” a dozen students said at once—Ranjit being one of them.

“Lava tubes, exactly,” Vorhulst agreed. “On Earth, tubes like Nahuku rarely grow to more than a couple of meters in diameter, but the moon is a different matter. In the moon’s trivial gravity they could grow ten times as big—could grow to the size of the Chunnel between England and France. And they’re sitting there, waiting for some human being to come along and dig down to one of them and caulk it—very thoroughly caulk it—and fill it with air … and then rent out bedroom space in it to immigrants from Earth.” He looked up at the timing light over the screen, which had gone from green to amber and was now flashing red. “And that’s the end of today’s session,” he said.

But, as a matter of fact, it really wasn’t because at least a dozen hands were still up. Dr. Vorhulst cast a rueful glance at the implacably red timing light, but surrendered. “All right,” he said. “One more question. What is it?”

Several of the hand raisers dropped their own hands to turn eagerly toward a boy Ranjit had seen in the company of the boy who was his seatmate, Jude. He spoke right up, as though he had been waiting for his chance. “Dr. Vorhulst,” he said, “a few of us would like to know your opinion on something. What you say often sounds as though you think intelligent life might be quite common in the galaxy. Do you think that is true?”

Vorhulst gave him a quizzical look. “Come on, guys! How do I know some of you don’t have brothers-in-law who work as newspaper reporters? And if I say what you want me to say, what’s the story going to be, ‘University Stargazer Claims Countless Alien Races Will Compete with Humanity’?”

The boy stood his ground. “Do you?” he asked.

Vorhulst sighed. “All right,” he said. “It’s a fair question and I’ll give you a fair answer. I know of no scientific reason why there could not be a number, perhaps a quite large number, of life-bearing planets in our galaxy, nor of any scientific reason why some number of them have not developed scientifically advanced civilizations. That’s the truth. I have never denied it. Of course,” he added, “I’m not talking about your crazy super-beings out of the comics who want to make us humans their slaves, or maybe exterminate us entirely. Like—what were their names? Superman’s enemies that his father had captured before their planet blew up and put into a floating space prison that looked sort of like a cubical paperweight, only something happened and they all got loose?”

A voice from the back row was already shouting, “You mean General Zod?” And another voice came up with, “And the girl, Urna.” And then half a dozen others put in, “And Non!”

The professor gave them all a grin. “I’m happy to see that so many of you are so well versed in the classics. Anyway, trust me on this. They don’t exist. No hideous space aliens are going to decide to exterminate us, and now let’s get out of here before they call the campus police.”

Although Dr. Joris Vorhulst had never heard of the Grand Galactics or any of their client species—and would have been likely to give a very different answer if he had—he, technically, was still quite right in what he said. No space aliens were going to decide to exterminate the human race. The only space aliens interested in the subject had already made the decision to do so and had then gone on to more entertaining matters.

The Grand Galactics were not motivated to keep their turf clear of inimical species out of any notion of living in peace and amity. What they desired, and attained, was an existence with the least possible distraction from their main interests. Some of these interests had to do with their plans for an ideal galactic environment, which they had some hope of attaining in another ten or twenty billion years. Other interests were more like what humans might call the appreciation of beauty.

The Grand Galactics found many things “beautiful,” including what humans would describe as numbering, nucleonics, cosmology, string (and non-string) theory, causality, and many other areas. In their enjoyment of the fundamental aspects of nature, they might spend centuries—millennia, if they chose—contemplating the rich spectral changes as, one by one, some single atom lost its orbital electrons. Or they might study the distribution of prime numbers greater than 10⁵⁰, or the slow maturation of a star from wispy gas and thin-scattered particles through the initiation of nuclear burning to its terminal state as a cooling white dwarf or, again, as a cloud of wisps and particles.

Oh, they did have other concerns. One, for example, was their project of increasing the proportion of heavy elements relative to primordial hydrogen in the galaxy’s chemical makeup. (They had a valid reason for this program, but not one that contemporary human beings would have understood.) Their other concerns were even less comprehensible to the likes of humanity. But, yes, they did consider the suppression of potentially dangerous civilizations worth doing.

Therefore the data concerning planet Earth required action. Their cease and desist order radioed to the human planet at light’s lazy stroll was still years from reaching its target. It would not be enough. Would not matter at all, in fact, because more urgent action was required. These upstart bipedal vertebrates not only possessed the technology of nuclear fission and fusion to an extent capable of creating inconveniencing weaponry, they already possessed a vast planetwide weapons industry to build on. The situation was even more annoying than the Grand Galactics had supposed, and they did not tolerate annoyance well.

They elected to terminate this particular annoyance.

When the Grand Galactics wished to convey an instruction to one of their client races, they had several delivery systems available. There was, for example, simple radio, efficient but ponderously slow. No electromagnetic signal—light, radar, that kind of thing—could go any faster than Dr. Einstein’s beloved c, which is to say an absolute maximum speed of some three hundred thousand kilometers a second. The Grand Galactics had devised some faster machines, sneaking through loopholes in relativity, but those were at most four or five times more speedy.

The Grand Galactics themselves, however—or any detachable fragment of them—being what ineffably nonbaryonic beings they were, suffered no such limitations. For reasons connected with the geometry of ten-dimensional space-time, their travel was composed of a number of laps, a to b, then b to c, then from c perhaps a straight shot to their destination. For each lap, however, transit time was always zero, whether across the diameter of a proton or from the galaxy’s core to its farthest-flung spiral arm.

So they took the inconvenient step of detaching a fragment of themselves to carry the instruction to the One Point Fives, and so the One Point Fives had their marching orders almost as soon as the Grand Galactics had decided to give them. And because the One Point Fives had anticipated what the decision would be, they were already in full marching order by the time the orders came.

The One Point Fives saw no reason to delay. Their invasion armada was quite ready to launch. They launched it.

To be sure, the One Point Fives were wholly material and thus not exempted from the speed-of-light rule. Roughly a human generation would pass before the armada could reach its destination and exterminate the undesirable species. But it was on its way.