Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

“Well, people are always frightened of what they don’t understand, and I don’t suppose the political boys have understood much of what’s been going on. Still you’d think that they’d have realized that we’re on pretty matey terms with Old Joe, wouldn’t you?”

“Unless they’ve interpreted it as evidence of a devil’s compact.”

The first move of the U.S. Government after Kingsley’s threat, and after London had confirmed the Cloud’s potential destructive power, was to give overriding priority to the building of a one-centimetre transmitter and receiver of the Nortonstowe design (which thanks to the information supplied by Nortonstowe at an earlier date was available to them). So excellent was American technical ability that the work was finished in an extremely short time. But the outcome was wholly disappointing. The Cloud did not reply to the American transmissions, nor were any messages that the Cloud addressed to Nortonstowe intercepted. There were two distinct reasons for these failures. Failure to intercept was due to a serious technical difficulty. Once communication between the Cloud and Nortonstowe became conversational there was no need for a very rapid transmission of information, as for instance there had been during the period when the Cloud was learning of our human scientific knowledge and cultural patterns. This enabled transmission band widths to be greatly reduced, which was desirable from the Cloud’s point of view, since interference with messages from other galactic denizens was thereby vastly lessened. Indeed so narrow was the band width and so low was the power used in the transmissions that the Americans were quite unable to discover the correct exact wave-length on which interception might have been achieved. The reason why the Cloud did not reply to the American transmissions was simpler. The Cloud would not reply unless a correctly coded signal was transmitted at the beginning of a message, and the U.S. Government did not possess the code.

Failure of communication led to other plans being followed. The nature of these plans came as a shock to Nortonstowe. News of them came through Parkinson, who rushed one afternoon into Kingsley’s office.

“Why are there so many fools in the world?’ he exclaimed in a rather wild tone.

“Good, you’ve seen the light at last, have you?’ was Kingsley’s comment.

“And you’re among them, Kingsley. Now we’re in an incredible mess, thanks to your imbecility combined with the cretin wits of Washington and Moscow.”

“Here, Parkinson, have a cup of coffee and calm down!”

“To hell with a cup of coffee. Listen to this. Let’s go back to the situation of 1958 before anybody had ever heard of the Cloud. You remember the arms race, with the U.S. and the Soviets competing furiously to see who could produce an intercontinental rocket first, all fitted up with hydrogen war heads of course? And as a scientist you’ll realize that to fire a rocket six or seven thousand miles from one point of the Earth’s surface to another is much the same problem as to fire a rocket right off the Earth altogether out into space.”

“Parkinson, you’re not trying to tell me …”

“I’m telling you that work in the U.S. and in Russia on this problem has advanced much farther than the British Government realized. We’ve only learned about it in the last day or two. We only learned of it when both the U.S. Government and the Soviets announced that they’ve fired off rockets, fired them at the Cloud.”

“The incredible fools. When did this happen?”

“Within the last week. Apparently there’s been an undercover competition that we knew nothing about. The U.S. has been trying to outdo the Soviets and vice versa of course. They’re reckoning to show each other what they can do, quite apart from killing the Cloud.”

“We’d better get Marlowe, Leicester, and Alexandrov along and see what we can manage to salvage from the wreck.”

McNeil happened to be talking to Marlowe, so he joined the group when they assembled. After Parkinson had gone over his story again Marlowe said:

“It’s happened. This is what I feared when I blew up at you the other day, Chris.”

“You mean you foresaw this?”

“Oh, not this exactly, so far as the details go. I’d no idea of how far they’d got with their miserable rockets. But I felt in my bones that something of this sort would happen. You see you’re too logical, Chris. You don’t understand people.”

“How many of these rockets have been sent?’ asked Leicester.

“As far as our information goes, upwards of a hundred from the U.S. and perhaps fifty or so from the Russians.”

“Well, I don’t see that it’s so important,” Leicester remarked. “The energy in a hundred hydrogen bombs may seem a lot to us, but it’s surely only microscopic compared to the energy in the Cloud. I should have thought that this business is sillier than trying to kill a rhino with a tooth-pick.”

Parkinson shook his head.

“As I understand it, they’re not trying to blow the Cloud to pieces, they’re trying to poison it!”

“Poison it! How?”

“With radio-active materials. You heard the Cloud describe what could happen if radio-active materials penetrated its screen. They got all that from the Cloud’s own statements.”

“Yes, I suppose a few hundred tons of highly radio-active stuff might be a different story.”

“Radio-active particles start ionization in wrong place. Discharges, more ionization, and whole bloody works goes sky high,” said Alexandrov.

Kingsley nodded.

“The point goes back to the old business of us working on D.C. and the Cloud on A.C. To work an A.C. system high voltages are necessary. We don’t have high voltages in the body, and that’s of course why we’re obliged to work on D.C. But the Cloud must have high voltages in order to operate its A.C. communication over big distances. And if there are high voltages, a few electrified particles in the wrong places among insulating material can cause a devil of a mess, as Alexis says. Incidentally, Alexis, what’s your feeling about it all?”

The Russian was even briefer than was his usual wont.

“Don’t like,” he said.

“What about the Cloud screen? Won’t that prevent the stuff going through?’ Marlowe asked.

“I think that’s where the nasty part of the plan comes in,” Kingsley answered. “The screen probably works on gas, not on solids, so it won’t stop the rockets. And there won’t be any radiative material until they explode, and I expect the idea is that they won’t explode until they get through the screen.”

Parkinson confirmed this.

“That’s right,” he said. “They’re set to home on any substantial solid body. So they’ll go straight for the Cloud’s neurological centres. At least that’s the idea.”

Kingsley got up and paced the room, talking as he walked.

“Even so, it’s a mad-dog scheme. Consider the objections. First, it may not work, or suppose it works just enough to annoy the Cloud seriously but not to kill it. Then come the reprisals. The whole of life on the Earth might be wiped out with as little compunction as we would have in swatting a fly. The Cloud never sounded to me to have any real enthusiasm for life on planets.”

“But it always sounded pretty reasonable in discussions,” cut in Leicester.

“Yes, but its outlook might be changed by a fierce headache. In any case I can’t believe that discussions with us have occupied more than a tiny fraction of the Cloud’s whole brain. It’s probably doing a thousand and one other things at the same time. No, I don’t think we’ve the slightest reason to believe that it’s going to be nice about it. And that’s only the first risk. There’ll be an equally grave risk even if they’re successful in killing the Cloud. The break-up of its neurological activity is bound to lead to the most terrifying outbursts — what we might call death throes. From a terrestrial point of view the amount of energy held at the Cloud’s disposal is simply colossal. In the event of sudden death all this energy will be released, and once again our chance of survival will be remote in the extreme. It’ll be like being shut in a stable with a thrashing elephant, only incomparably worse — to use an Irishism. Finally and overwhelmingly, if the Cloud is killed and we are lucky enough to survive against all the probabilities, we’ll have to live permanently with a disk of gas around the Sun. And as everyone knows, that’s not going to be pleasant. So whichever way you look, it seems impossible to understand this business. Do you understand the psychology of it, Parkinson?”