He woke up, finally, when the doorbell wouldn’t stop ringing.
He looked at his watch and cursed. 3.45 AM. He groped for the remote door latch opener. Where the hell were all these bloody gadgets when one needed them? The remote was on the couch at the far end of the room. He cursed again. Like a zombie he trudged the entire distance of 7 feet from his bed to the door, opened it a crack and peered out.
He saw two men and a woman standing outside. All had wooden faces. All wore business suits, on the lapels of which were affixed some sort of badges. The badges looked familiar. The visitors didn’t.
He cursed. This time more fluently. What a time for direct marketing. He was about to bang the door in their faces when the woman rushed uncertainly, " Dr. Tzine? Dr. Fingleton Tzine?"
The door banged in her face. The trio looked at each other, stunned. Nobody shuts the door in the faces of high-ranking government officials. They felt like rookie salesmen on their first beat. The woman’s face turned red. The older of her two escorts looked at the closed door and shrugged philosophically as if to say, " I warned you."
The younger man probably fancied himself as the action man of the trio. In a fit of bravado - or having seen too many Men in Black movies- he rushed in and was about to kick in the offending partition when the door again creaked open and the young man pitched into the small room headlong and fell flat on his face near the bunk.
Tzine watched the whole performance from besides the door, which he had just opened as an afterthought, and raised an eyebrow towards the older gentleman. He just shrugged and walked in the room to give the young man a hand.
" If you are through with the Vaudeville bit, do you mind telling me what the fuck this is all about?" Tzine said mildly.
The visitors looked at each other. Then looked at Tzine. Looking at the small, pajama clad figure smelling of cheap vodka and scratching a two-day’s stubble around bleary eyes, any ideas they might have had about a Dirty Harry type ace detective underwent a hasty revision. Except for the swearing.
Then, as if in a well-rehearsed routine, the woman cleared her throat and began to speak.
" Dr. Tzine, my name is Stevenson, and this is Mr. Perkins and Mr. Appleby," she said pointing at her elder and younger companions in turn. " We work for the Deep Space Research Wing across town. Your dossier was made available to us by our analysts late this afternoon. Along with those of half a dozen others in your line of work. I’m sorry it took us till this late to find our man from among the possibles. We need your help."
Tzine motioned them to sit. The trio looked around the small room to find a suitable place to park themselves. But seeing as the couch was piled with clothes a week late for laundry, they decided that it was safer to stand. Tzine shrugged and sat on his bunk, the only other piece of furniture in the room.
" Shoot," Tzine muttered between lips busy with a cigarette, which he proceeded to light and blew smoke in the already musty air in the small room.
Young Appleby, clearly not used to his authority being treated in such cavalier manner, was about to say some suitable words like " look here, you..", but the older man signaled him to shut up by employing the age-old discreet method of kicking him in his shin. Now, government agents obviously are ignorant of companies like Nike or Reebok. Heavy leather boots are their preferred articles for getting shod. Consequently, the young man just managed a whimper.
The woman ignored the not so discreet byplay between her colleagues and continued.
" This morning, at 1145 hours GMT, we got a report from our moon colony that an orbiting craft encountered a strange object earlier in the morning, our time, in deep space shooting past the moon at two hundred and seventy six thousand kilometers a second, thirteen million kilometers away from the surface of the moon, heading towards our sun. At first, everybody thought it was a small meteorite. But as the object was traveling extremely fast, our probes decided to investigate. On closer inspection they found that it was, in fact, a metal box admeasuring three meters. The pilot, of course, thought that it was a hoax played on him by the colony miners. But he nevertheless grabbed the box with his ship’s magnetic nets and towed it in Moon Station 3.
Imagine the surprise of the Moon Station 3 crew when they found that the box was made of a strange silvery material, which glowed dully. Closer examination using the material testers available on the colony showed that the box was made of a substance unknown to man. They then.."
" How did they know for sure that it is made of a substance unknown to man? If I recall correctly, this happened only this morning." Tzine interrupted.
The younger man finally got a word in.
" Dr. Tzine," he said with a supercilious air, " The moon colony people are miners. It is their job to be good at material detection. The best metal testers in the world are their everyday playthings. Nobody knows more about metals and material testing that those miners. When they say it’s an unknown substance, you can bet your last dollar that it’s an unknown substance."
Appleby let his gaze wander around the room pointedly. It looked as if it had been quite a while since Dr.Tzine has bet his last dollar. And lost.
Perkins thought of Tzine’s dossier. A PhD in Quantum Physics, a promising research career at Cal Tech. Till one day he finds that scientists, like the rest of the human race, are a corrupt and thieving lot. Oldest story in science. Senior passes off new work by a junior as his own. Or attaches his name - undeservedly – to a thesis. And hogs all the limelight. A few years later, the junior is relegated to obscurity and the senior climbs another notch farther up in the funding ladder to find another dupe. How many scientists start their careers with visions or discovering Earth-shaking truths about reality? And for every Einstein the world begets, how many end up being the research equivalent of second assistant bookkeepers?
Perkins had seen it all in his 20 years with the Wing’s security division.
It happens to fighter pilots who fail grades half way through Jet aircraft training. It happens to race drivers who realize they can never win another race. It happened to Dr. Fingleton Tzine. The realization that life has passed you by. The realization that you cannot change the course of history, that you cannot write your name in the book of time. The black, damning realization that your life just doesn’t matter to anybody and anything one way or another. The dreams of youth and visions of grandeur die slowly but surely, until one day you wake up with a huge hangover and an empty hole inside and find yourself as a freelance consultant in space security. Or Dr. Fingleton Tzine, age 40.
Perkins nodded sympathetically. Tzine certainly didn’t deserve Appleby’s attitude at 4 in the morning. He motioned Stevenson to continue.
She took a while to gather her thoughts and then continued.
"… Then they called us in. That was at about 1130 hours, yesterday. We- the three of us- flew there in one of our fast shuttles, took one look, and straight away decided to call in an expert. Which is where you come in."
" Why? What did you see that you didn’t investigate on your own to start with?" Tzine frowned.
" Nothing." Said the elderly man, Perkins, shrugging. Perkins, Tzine observed, was much given to shrugging. A sure sign of a long stint in his current job. You saw so many crazy things in this line of business that sooner or later one gets to be philosophically resigned.
" Eh?" Tzine raised an eyebrow. Raising an eyebrow was Tzine’s equivalent to one of Perkins’s shrugs. Tzine, obviously, was so far gone in this business that he didn’t even bother to take the trouble to shrug.
" Nothing. There is nothing to see."
" And what’s inside?" Tzine asked a note of interest creeping in his words.
" If there is an inside, who knows?" Perkins shrugged, "The box is opaque to all our x ray detectors. The fucking thing is shut tight as the proverbial fish’s ass. No joints. No welds. Not even nano welds. We checked. No doors. No lid. Nothing."
Tzine lit another cigarette. He was wide-awake now. " Hmmm.. What does it weigh?"
" 13 kgs. On the moon. That is about 78 kgs. Here on earth."
" You didn’t try to cut it open did you?" Tzine said looking at Appleby. He looked exactly the sort to do such a stupid thing. Too young and too sure of himself to listen to any voice of caution. The sort that gets you killed in this line of work. Space, after all, was the most hostile territory encountered by man. God simply hadn’t designed men to go out in space. That they did was in no small means due to the extraordinary security precautions taken by people like Perkins and his pals, who obviously worked as security specialists at the Deep Space Research Wing. And the few freelance specialists like Tzine himself. Maybe the box contained an unknown strain of virus. Not likely. But if it did, and an idiot like Appleby was just the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth and count it’s teeth, then it would be back to Adam and Eve for mankind. And this was a benevolent option in this line of work. If the box contained an alien bomb, then it would be bye bye Adam and Eve altogether. Along with poor Eden.
" Of course not. We are, after all, professionals. We decided to call you in straight away." The woman said in a hurt tone.
Tzine nodded satisfied. He ground out the cigarette on the wall and stuffed the stub back in the pack.
" I hope you know my regular charges. I expect half of it in advance."
Perkins produced an envelope and handed it to Tzine without a word.
" Pretty sure of yourselves, weren’t you?"
Perkins shrugged," Let’s go" he said.
Tzine changed into jeans and sneakers. He wore a loose shirt, which was surprisingly neatly pressed. He didn’t bother to shave.
They arrived at Moon Station by one of the Research Wing’s fast shuttles. The guys who named these ships as "fast shuttles" weren’t kidding. They arrived at Moon Station 3 in an hour. No chemical rockets for the top government guys. These newfangled shuttles worked on gravity drives. That way the g forces at liftoff and touchdown didn’t kill the occupants.
The box was kept in a quarantine room. The room was equipped with the state of the art sensors and a very hard vacuum was maintained inside the room itself, which was easier to do here on the moon than on earth.
The walls of the room were made of a two- meter thick steel plate, lined with lead to prevent radioactive contamination. There were no glass observation ports to the room. The box could be viewed as a computer generated hologram outside the room in the observation chamber. The data from the sensors was fed to a computer which generated a real time three dimensional image for viewing. It would have been stupid to have glass observation ports. Even heavily reinforced thick glass walls. Things like light pass through glass. Maybe it was some sort of a laser bomb. Even if the box contained a virus or any living thing, the observers were safe from contamination. Tzine prayed that it was not a bomb. Steel walls wouldn’t do much good if the entire hemisphere of the moon were blown off.
They all looked at the 3D image of the dully-glowing box apprehensively.
This is how people like Perkins grew old before their time in this line of work. Worry. Constant worry. And fear. Fear of the unknown. One false move and boom! Worse, if you are not lucky. If you live as long as Perkins’s middle age, you must be good. Or lucky. And in line for your fourth coronary.
Tzine wondered what kind of life people like Perkins led. Divorced, most likely after a brief marriage. And married to the job ever after. Till death does you apart. Or Stevenson, for that matter. No doubt she was competent. And trying desperately to hide her fear. Girlish visions of becoming a romantic space pilot dyeing eventually, till one day she realized that she was too old or too bored to go to the trouble of getting married or having kids. Maybe had a dog or a cat instead. No social life, few friends, odd hours. Till the time biology catches up with you. Then a brief affair with a fellow like, maybe, Perkins. Or a fellow as unlike Perkins as she could find. Ending in the inevitable split. Till there is no heartache, no ability to feel heartache. Back to square one.
Space wasn’t exactly either exciting or glamorous after a century of space travel. Like railway travel in the twentieth century. Astronauts weren’t poster boy stuff any more. They were miners.
So, trapped in just another job, all your emotions run dry. Or are bottled up tight inside, never to see the light of day.
Like inside the alien box in the quarantine room.
Tzine saw the box. It was three meters by three meters by three meters. A perfect cube. Accurate to as far as the sensory microscopes could tell. And sealed perfectly. No welds or joints. A perfect black- box.
" It must be hollow, or else its weight would have been much more." Tzine observed.
" We deduced that." Stevenson nodded. " We tested the density of the material by our remote non destructive testers. It is a bit more than that of plastic."
" Did you date the material? It is glowing dully. It may be radioactive." Tzine said.
" We were hoping you’d say that. First thing we thought of. But we decided to wait for your counsel. Better safe than sorry." Perkins said.
He ordered a technician to feed data into the computer’s radioactive dating algorithms.
" The material is highly inert. So this will take some time." The technician warned.
" Lets grab a burger and coffee if there is a place here somewhere." Stevenson suggested. They all agreed enthusiastically.
They sat at a small round table in the corner of the deli and ordered burgers and coffee. As Tzine lit a cigarette, the waitress frowned at him. Moon people hated to waste oxygen. Tzine ignored her and turned to Perkins.
" What do you think?"
Perkins shrugged, " It ain’t a bomb, just a hopeful guess. A bomb would be the obvious suspect. Too likely. Nothing we can do if it’s a bomb anyway. Before we figure out how to diffuse it, it would surely go off. As a matter of fact it should have done so anytime in the last 12 hours. Also, it doesn’t appear to have a guidance system. ET would wish to propel his bombs, if he wants to do us in. This thing was just drifting aimlessly through space, not particularly towards the earth. Its trajectory would take it in the direction of the Serpens cluster, bypassing it by a good ten thousand light years. Unlikely that it would be captured in earth orbit so far off. There was nothing in its line of flight for the next billion light years as far as we could tell. This in itself is an amazing thing. As if it was deliberately pointed at its launch to avoid being smashed into any massive body. And a malicious ET would have no point in killing the few thousand people on the moon. Could be a virus though. You open it, and pfft! You vomit out the life out of your lungs."
" But you all agree that it is an object created by an intelligent race or being?" Tzine asked.
They all nodded at the obvious.
" It looks to be of a specific design, built by an intelligent being. Perfect cubes don’t appear in nature. Perfect cubes of a single material are impossible. Perfect hollow cubes of one single material, ridiculous." Stevenson observed.
They all nodded and dug into the food.
Tzine was into his second cup of coffee when Perkins’s phone rang. He spoke in it for a minute and hung up. He then proceeded to take a cigarette out of Tzine’s pack and lit it looking thoughtfully at the glowing tip. The waitress, by now, looked fit to be tied.
" Well?" Appleby asked impatiently. Stevenson sat up straight in her chair. She knew that Perkins wasn’t a habitual smoker. Nobody with three coronary transplants was.
Perkins looked at Tzine balefully and shrugged.
" It’s about 48 hours old."
" Bullshit."
It was Appleby who broke the silence after about a full minute. Tzine ignored him and poured himself another cup. Appleby looked at them one after another for support but none looked forthcoming.
" What’s the matter with you all? This is bullshit and you know it. The techs must have made a mistake. If the box is just 48 hours old, it must have originated from within a distance of 48 light hours from this place, at the most. We all know that it is sitting on its ass in the Q room for the last 12 hours. That makes a maximum traveling distance of 36 light hours. That’s about a distance of 38.88 billion kilometers from here in all directions. We know for sure that there is no other intelligent life around earth for at least a hundred and fifty light years in all directions. At least no life intelligent enough to make that box. Or SETI would have heard of them by now."
Tzine looked at Perkins, who nodded.
" Shut up Appleby," he said.
" But sir…"
" Mr. Appleby, you may not know that there are other means of transport available in this universe which don’t give a damn about the speed of light in general and Relativity in particular." Tzine said mildly between mouthfuls of coffee.
" But that’s just theory Dr. Tzine. The box is real." Stevenson said doubtfully. " I think I would go with Appleby on this one."
" Look for wear and tear on the surface of the box due to cosmic dust. Find an estimate of how long the box has been out in space based on that. You know the direction from which it came and the average density of matter in that region of space. " Tzine said to Perkins, ignoring Stevenson and Appleby.
Perkins got on his phone and spoke rapidly. Then he said, " That’s OK, I’ll hold."
After a while he said " Thank you, Johnny." and hung up.
" Well?" Stevenson said impatiently.
" Considerable wear and tear due to cosmic dust. Although the amount varies from region to region, the techs say that on average it’s been in space for about forty thousand years."
Stevenson and Appleby both looked at Perkins, speechless.
" Hmmm. Getting curioser and curioser." Said Tzine.
Perkins shrugged and proceeded to light another of Tzine’s cigarettes. The waitress had by now resigned herself to the prospect of Lunar warming due to nicotine pollution.
" Well, let’s say it’s not a bomb. And it is unlikely to be a virus. Let us, for the time being assume that it is not malicious in any way. So what is it? What can travel for 36 hours and accumulate forty thousand year’s worth of cosmic wear? Or more precisely how can it do so? Any guesses?" Tzine said.
Nobody took him up on it for a while. Then Stevenson said,
" If it is not malicious, then what is it? A gift? A gift from ET? A first communication? I don’t think so."
" Why not?" Tzine asked, amused.
" Because ET would not send a gift in an unmarked black box. There would definitely be some form of return postage stamps attached. He would make damned sure to advertise that it was undoubtedly a product of an intelligent race. Like we do on golden plaques on all our deep space ships. He would send the gift attached to a craft. Not just float out a cube in space and hope for the best. He would deduce that any beings intelligent enough to catch it in space and deduce his presence somewhere in the universe would have exactly our fears about the box. Maybe we’d choose not to risk opening it thinking it’s a bomb."
" Maybe ET doesn’t think as we do. Maybe he doesn’t know fear. Or maybe he isn’t interested in meeting aliens who get easily frightened. Maybe ET reasons that a frightened people are more likely to make stupid mistakes. Like starting intergalactic wars. So let us say that the box is neither benevolent nor malevolent. Still leaves us at square one. Worse, we don’t know how it could get here in 36 hours. From where?" Perkins said.
" Ask your technicians to cut off a small sliver from the surface of the box in such a way as not to puncture it. Ask them to weigh it and also calculate the volume of the piece. Then extrapolate this data over nine cubic meters. It would give us an idea of the weight of whatever is inside the box."
Stevenson nodded, " OK, lets find out what the box itself weighs and the weight of whatever is inside."
Perkins got on the phone again and hung up after giving instructions. After a while, his phone rang and he listened for a while and hung up without a word. He looked at Tzine and said,
" There’s nothing in the box. Absolutely nothing. A perfect vacuum. The box itself is about an inch thick, judging by the topology meters."
" Ah." Tzine nodded and finished his coffee, " Lets go. Showtime."
Back outside the quarantine room, Perkins ordered the technicians to open the box by slicing off the top using a laser cutter.
As the lid came off, they all watched in silence at the computer generated hologram.
The tension in the room became palpable. After all, it could still be a bomb. Or who knows what other exotic malicious device.
As the lid came off, they all sighed in unison. It was almost anticlimactic. There was nothing inside the box.
As expected.
Then,
" Look.." one of the technicians shouted.
Nobody needed any urging. They all were doing exactly that. With very wide eyes.
Before their eyes, as if by magic, a solid figure began to materialize inside the box. Within a few seconds, it shimmered back and forth into nothingness and then settled into a solid sphere, about six feet in diameter. Nobody needed further tests to verify the material of which it was made. Everybody knew the soft yellow glow of the metal by sight, far more accurately than any metal detector. Gold.
And there were endless lines of markings on the surface of the golden sphere.
" Halleluiah." Tzine said with a grin. He turned to Perkins who had eyes only for the golden sphere. " I’ll expect the rest of my fees in about a day’s time."
Back at the deli half an hour later, the quartet again sat at the same round table, but this time with glasses of a drink much stronger than coffee. Tzine believed in celebrating with Vodka. Stevenson and Appleby ordered the more conservative Champagne. Perkins stuck to coffee.
" What the hell do you think happened in there?" Appleby, predictably, shot the first question. He couldn’t wait to know another minute.
Tzine grinned at him for the first time. Ah! To be young and impatient again! And ignorant.
" That was ET’s equivalent of our golden plaque."
" Yes, of course. But how did it just materialize out of thin air – or thin vacuum? The bloody thing must weigh a ton. Yet when we weighed the box, it weighed quite a bit less – 78 kgs on earth to be precise. Where did the Golden orb come from? What happened to its mass while inside the box?" Appleby rushed ahead. His head was swimming with a million questions. He hadn’t forgotten the mystery about the distance it had traveled and its age.
" They say that if all of us stop looking at the moon, it will dissolve and disappear in a few million years," Tzine said, half mocking.
" What?" Appleby was not overly endowed with an imagination which could make the moon disappear.
" Well, what do you expect? Obviously ET isn’t as dumb as us earthlings. The box – the perfectly sealed box – was an advanced version of the old Schrodinger’s cat experiment as modified by a gentleman by the name of Alain Aspect back in the twentieth century to prove the Bell inequalities. The details are a bit too technical for you guys, especially Einstein here," he waved his cups in the direction of Appleby, " suffice it to say that it involves entangled particles and Einstein’s spooky action at a distance. I’ll run you through the basics, as I could hardly be expected to explain all aspects of a hundred years of research in a hundred seconds."
Appleby decided that he positively hated all space security consultants in general and Tzine in particular. He thought about leaving in a huff, or some such appropriate repartee, but curiosity got the better of him.
Tzine continued,
"Quantum Physicists have known for over a century now about entangled particles. They are entities affected by a single probability wave sometimes in their histories, so that when one of them is affected at any time in its future, the other one correspondingly reacts instantaneously. Across a separation of any distance between the two entangled particles. This obviously violates Relativity, which says that no signal can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum – c. However, such particles exist or can be manufactured and tested in labs. Such entangled particles potentially get information about the other particle instantaneously across any distance in the universe, and to hell with the light barrier. This is pure fact and Alain Aspect proved this back in the twentieth century with an experiment using polarized light particles, although Einstein himself hated the idea and had earlier called it "spooky action at a distance" in his famous EPR Paradox."
"This box is a much more advanced version, but the basic idea is the same. ET must have made two such boxes. The golden sphere we saw was one part of an entangled pair. A pair of golden spheres. Although it is a lot larger than a single elementary particle, once the principle is established, size is just a matter of mere complexity. ET looks to be capable of handling such complexity."
" But why? What’s the point?" Stevenson asked.
" Like I said, ET is a lot smarter than us. We send out golden plaques with information about mankind and our message of peace out in space with all our crafts. Say, an alien gets the message after a thousand years. We will know about him only after another thousand or so years. And that is if ET chooses to communicate with us at all or is in a position to communicate. What if he doesn’t have space capabilities? Or radio capabilities? What if we know about ET only when he comes calling, armed to the teeth – or whatever ET’s chew with- with a galactic fleet?"
"But thanks to the entangled pair of golden orbs, you can bet your last dollar that this particular ET knows that his message was intercepted and received somewhere in the universe in the same instant that we know he exists. Saves a lot of time both ways." Tzine said.
" But where the hell was the bloody sphere all this time?"
" It was in the box itself. In the form of a probability wave. You all have heard about the collapse of the wave functions of elementary particles. Every quantum Physicist knows that a quantum entity, like an electron, exists as a real particle only when it is been watched by an intelligent observer. We have known that since the Copenhagen Interpretation back in the middle of the last century. When a quantum entity, like an electron, is not watched, it dissolves into a probability wave associated with the particle. It becomes real only if and when observed.
You all know the Schrodinger’s cat experiment in which there is a live cat in a closed box. There is a radioactive substance in the box, which emits alpha particles. There is a Geiger counter to measure if the alpha particle has been emitted. There is a vial of a poisonous substance in the box, which is designed to break open, killing the cat, if the Geiger counter records an alpha particle, which is either emitted or not depending on the quantum probabilities governing the radioactive substance’s half life. Let’s say, in this simple experiment, that there is a 50 % probability of an alpha particle being emitted and a 50% probability of it not being emitted, for simplicity.
Now the Copenhagen interpretation says that, after some time, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time unless an intelligent observer – like a human – decides to look in and see if the alpha particle has been emitted by the radioactive substance or not. Till that time, the entire inside of the box is in a superposition of states. In one state, the alpha particle is emitted and the cat dies. In another, it isn’t and the cat is alive. This is the standard Cat-in-the-box experiment.
Now Imagine that there are two such connected boxes with two cats and a radioactive substance can emit an alpha particle in either one of the two boxes, killing the cat in it. Say, after a while, both boxes are perfectly sealed and separated. You can separate the boxes by a few meters or a few light years, it doesn’t matter.
Now one of the boxes contains a dead cat and one contains a live cat. But we don’t know which is which. So both the cats are both alive and dead at the same time, as per the Copenhagen interpretation. Not just because we don’t know, but quantum mechanics states that not even the universe knows about the state of the cats unless one of the boxes is opened."
Appleby was looking extremely cynical by this time. Tzine looked at him and smiled,
" If you think this is ridiculous, wait till I finish. Now comes the funny part. If, say, the boxes are taken apart by a distance of a few light years before one of the boxes is opened to determine the health of the cat, guess what happens?"
" You find either a dead cat and a nose-full of stink or a live cat and a box full of cat-shit, provided it can eat and breathe in the meantime," Said Appleby.
" Exactly," Tzine said, "but if you find a live cat, in the same bloody instant that you find a live cat, the other cat dies. Instantaneously, even across a distance of a few light years. And vice versa, if you find a dead cat. The other box gets the signal that the first box has been observed and reacts to preserve quantum probability even at a distance of a few light years, instantaneously. Such a signal obviously travels faster than light or it will take a few years to influence the other cat.
This violates Relativity, but is an absolute fact of the universe we live in, strange as it seems. For us it is just a curiosity of quantum mechanics, to be debated in ivy halls. ET obviously knows this and has used it in a far more practical way than we have so far.
The inside of ET’s box hadn’t been observed in 40, 000 years. So the orb dissolved into its associated wave and materialized only when we were there to see it. Saves ET the expense of lugging a ton of mass in space. Another orb would no doubt have materialized in the second box with ET. ET doesn’t even have to open the box to know that. The weight of the second box before and after would tell him that there is intelligent life out there, studying his signal. Instantly, across perhaps 40,000 light years."
" And the radioactive dating of the box?"
" Oh! It just means that the box, according to it’s own clock was about 48 hours into its journey. Happens if you travel close to the speed of light. Time dilation. Nothing to do with the distance it actually traveled. The cosmic dust wear and tear was the real indicator." Tzine finished his third vodka and reluctantly got up to leave.
" It’s up to you guys now to find out what ET wants. It’s none of my business, but you guys better be quick about it. ET knows that we are out there somewhere. He knows the direction in which he fired the box and its speed. He also knows when we got his message. I’d say that if ET has discovered high school mathematics, he’s had us pinpointed to an accuracy of about a few million kilometers by now." He said. "That’s pretty nearly a dead giveaway to earth, considering the separation between planets in our solar system. So now we are sure that there is somebody out there and he, she or it knows we are here. This is what we were hoping for all along. And this is what we were afraid of. Well, I’d sleep a lot less easy from now on."
Perkins’s face lost its grin in a flash and resumed its habitual worried look.
Finally, reluctantly, Perkins got up and shook Tzine’s hand as if to say good-bye and pressed another envelope in his hand. That was fast work by government standards. Normally the government was a lousy paymaster.
Tzine raised an eyebrow to show his amazement. Perkins grinned, and shrugged.
"I want to write stories that cram ideas mile- a- minute. The future has its own set of problems ready for us. I want to explore those. I've written a book, which explores the future of the latest scientific theories and their philosophical implications. The book is in need of a publisher!
Some of my short stories have been published in e zines (four of them here in Aphelion) and I am in search of a publisher who will publish them as a collection in book form.
The science in my stories, I am ready to defend. The characters, I admit, behave indefensibly."
Swanand's first publication was "No News is Good News" in the August 2001 issue of Aphelion.
E-mail: swanandarole@hotmail.com
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