Fred Hoyle - Element 79

When at last the first extrasolar system mission was blasted out into distant space, Pev was included in the crew, on much this same basis. Nobody knew what to expect on a planet ten light years away. Pev’s sheer brute strength might have its place. If it didn’t turn out that way, the mission would hardly be prejudiced, it seemed—there was plenty of brain-power in the rest of the crew.

Monotony was the killer on the outward journey. Everybody expected trouble with time but nobody had quite realized how bad it was going to be. It was the concentration that went to pieces—you tried to read, but your attention inevitably wandered. You didn’t talk, because you got to hate the others. You tried to sleep, but after a while you found you couldn’t sleep properly, you kept waking every ten or twenty minutes.

In the narrow confines of the spaceship, the crew baited Pev unmercifully. It was a raw, primitive situation, with everybody pecking the unfortunate individual who happened to lie at the bottom of the order. True, Pev could have smashed any one of them in two or three massive blows, but his upbringing and his temperament forbade any such crude physical demonstration. He took it all with a smile, but it bit gradually deeper as time went slowly by. Particularly, he came to hate the navigational fixes. Naturally, he did the measurements wrong, and his reductions of the data hadn’t the smallest conceivable validity in mathematics. The others forced him to do them just for the laughs. They stood around while he made the measurements, then they all examined his reduction sheets. Like an animal which learns to play up to its master, Pev learned to do the fixes in the way that seemed to amuse them most. He stood there smiling as they laughed, pitifully hoping to ingratiate himself, like a dog thumping its tail.

Once they landed on the new planet, Pev had a fair measure of revenge. Gravity turned out to be seventy percent stronger than it is on Earth. He was the only one strong enough to get around more or less normally. The others moved slowly, especially uphill, when their gait reminded Pev of climbers near the summit of Mount Everest. They panted and sweated as if their hearts and lungs were bursting, which was very nearly true. It was a pity, because the new planet was quite remarkably beautiful. There were big woolly clouds and lots of gentle, warm rain. It was wonderfully green everywhere. Shimmering streams ran down valleys glowing with brilliant flowers. There were fish in the streams. There were insects and tiny animals the size of a mouse, but no large creatures and no birds.

To Pev it was a veritable Paradise. He traveled about as much as he could, but with the others more or less incapacitated by the deadly gravitation, he couldn’t venture too far away. After the cramped years in the spaceship, it was galling not to be able to cover the whole of this new world. Yet the nights made up in a large measure for Pev’s disappointment. The nights were the chief glory of this new world. The sky blazed with pulsating colors, driven like lances across the heavens. Mostly there would be three or four arcs of light. They didn’t stay long in the same place. New arcs would flash out like the trail of a brilliant meteorite, sometimes overhead, sometimes down near the horizon, sometimes to the right of you, sometimes to the left. You never knew where the next one would burst out. Occasionally, perhaps half a dozen times in a night, the whole sky would fill with lights, as if a huge, multicolored cosmic firecracker had suddenly gone off. It was all completely silent.

The mission was not so much concerned with esthetics, however, as with the collection of facts. Auroral activity of this very great intensity must produce strong electromagnetic signals. Receivers were set up. Sure enough, there were electromagnetic signals in plenty. The emissions were monitored carefully from day to day and it emerged that there were marked regularities. The aspects of a phased situation were revealed step by step. Incredible as it seemed, there was a controlled order in the magnetosphere of this planet. Could some form of data-processing be going on up there? Were the electrons and the magnetic field disposed in such a configuration that the vast magnetosphere, encompassing the whole planet, was behaving like a gigantic electronic brain?

The next step was for the crew to transmit electromagnetic signals themselves. This they did in the hope of receiving some response. So far as anybody could tell, either by looking directly up at the flickering sky, or from the instrumental records, there was no change. It all went on exactly the same as before. The mission continued its explorations on the ground, but there was always a return to the sky, to the problem of what was going on up there.

After their long outward journey, the men had come to feel acutely alone. Earth was now many many years away. Memories of acquaintances, even of families and friends, had become unpleasantly diffuse, as if the old life had lost reality. The spaceship had become their world. During the voyage it had seemed to each man as if the others were all there was of life, anywhere in the whole universe. The landing on this new planet had come as an indescribable relief. Even the insects were a relief. Yet the green valleys and the chuckling streams were no substitute for some form of intelligible communication. It was this the men ached for, not so much to learn something new as to feel they weren’t alone. The desperate need was to get away from the feeling of isolation, of being a negligible microcosm in the vast, implacable, unyielding infinity of space and time.

Establishing contact with the wonderful thing in the sky came to have overriding importance. Then failure after failure led to a growing impatience. If only the thing would respond in some way, any way, even an answering ray of light would do, only so long as it didn’t go on ignoring them. All they wanted now was the slightest sign of recognition. Yet nothing they did made the smallest difference.

Someone had the idea that perhaps their signals weren’t getting through, perhaps it wasn’t possible for signals to propagate directly from the ground into the magnetosphere. It could be the waves were being reflected or refracted, back to the ground again. This suggested that signals be injected directly into the magnetosphere, from the ship in orbit around the planet. Unfortunately, it meant waiting until the beginning of the homeward flight, because the captain didn’t want to put the strain of a double landing on his rocket motors, not with gravity as strong as it was here. Partly because of this, and partly because of the sheer physical strain of putting up day after day with the excess weight occasioned by the gravity, the captain decided to cut short the length of the explorations on the ground.

One trouble was that nobody had any idea of the kind of response they should be looking for. Could this thing be aware of the spaceship flying right through it, any more than we ourselves are aware of some particular bacterium inside our own bodies? The electromagnetic signals they were now injecting into it should be producing some disturbance, but could the Thing be aware of the source of the disturbance? At all events, they got no more in the way of a response than before. Whatever it was, it ignored them completely.

A reaction set in. The electronic-brain fell out of favor. It began to look as though they were dealing only with some unusual natural phenomenon and not at all with an utterly new form of “life.” This made a big difference, a big difference in the tactics they should adopt. They’d better quit fooling with electromagnetic signals. They’d better do something really effective to stir up the situation. A nuclear bomb exploded in the works, after the manner of the old Starfish project, was more in line with the needs of the case. Back on Earth there had been objectors to Starfish. Here there would be no objectors, thought the captain, as he set about preparations for the experiment in hand. Actually he was wrong. Pev objected, although he didn’t say so. Pev didn’t understand the talk about electronics, or of the need for a bomb, or about flutings in the magnetic field. What he did know was that he liked this planet, with its gentle landscape and its magnificent skies. He couldn’t conceive of any reason for wanting to change it.