Factoring Humanity

Sunlight. The one energy source any civilization anywhere in the universe might have access to. Not all worlds contained heavy elements, such as uranium, and surely not all had stores of fossil fuels. But every planet in the galaxy had one or more stars around which it circled.

She got up, closed the drapes.

The object stayed rigid. She sighed — of course it wouldn’t be that simple. She sat back down at her desk, thinking.

There was a creaking sound from across the room. As she watched, the construct began to buckle. She leaped to her feet, hurried across the floor and tried to catch the final cube before it fell apart, its two side panels and its bottom and end panels dropping away.

She tried to support the rest of the structure with one hand while frantically rebuilding her book buttress with the other. Once she had the object secured, she hustled back to the window and opened the blinds again.

Obviously, the thing had some trifling power-storage capacity. That only made sense in a solar-powered device; you couldn’t have it failing every time someone cast a shadow over it.

Well, then.

The first order of business was to make sure the construct was permanently powered; in a couple of hours the sun would no longer be coming through that window. She thought about taking it outside, but that would solve the problem only until evening. Clearly, the energy-efficient office fluorescents hadn’t provided enough illumination to power the construct yesterday, but she could get high-output electric lamps from the Theatre Department, or maybe from Botany.

She felt adrenaline surging through her. She had no idea yet of what she’d discovered, but she’d clearly made more progress with the alien messages than anyone else had.

She thought for a second about immediately logging on to the Alien Signal Center homepage and reporting what she’d found. That would be enough to ensure her priority. But it would also mean that in the next few days, hundreds of researchers would replicate what she’d already done — and one of them might take it to the next step, figuring out what the darn thing was for. She had a dozen years of career catching-up to do; discovering the construct’s purpose might be enough to make up for all the lost time…

She went to find some lamps.

And then she got down to work.

17

Kyle entered his lab, the lights coming on automatically as he did so.

“Good morning, Cheetah.”

“ ’Morning, Dr. Graves.”

“Hey, that was good. ‘ ’Morning.’ I like that.”

“I’m trying,” said Cheetah.

“You certainly are.”

“Was that a shot?”

“Moi?” But then Kyle shrugged and smiled. “Actually, yes it was — good job catching it. You’re making progress.”

“I certainly hope so. In fact — how’s this?” Cheetah paused, apparently waiting until he had Kyle’s full attention. “Julius Caesar wasn’t just the great-uncle of Augustus — he was also the son of the Wicked Witch of the West, and like the Wicked Witch, he could be killed by water. Well, given that, Cassius and the rest of the republican conspirators decide that they don’t need to off Big Julie with knives — they can do it far more cleanly with squirt guns. So they lay in wait for him, and when he comes down from the capitol, they open fire. Caesar resists, until he sees his best friend also shooting him, and with that, he utters his final words before falling down dead: ‘H₂, Brute?’ ” Kyle laughed.

Cheetah sounded inordinately pleased. “You’re laughing!”

“Well, it’s pretty good.”

“Maybe someday I will get the hang of being human,” said Cheetah.

Kyle sobered. “If you do, be sure to let me know.”

The stage lights were set up: three big lamps with Fresnel lenses on tripods, and barn doors to limit their beams. They were providing a constant source of power to the alien construct, letting it do whatever it was supposed to do.

And so far, all that seemed to be was to stay rigid. Heather could think of niche markets for such a product — a thought of Kyle darted through her mind — but she assumed that the aliens wouldn’t have spent ten years just telling her how to make something stay stiff.

And yet, maybe that was indeed all the aliens had wanted to convey: a way to make materials stand up to great stresses, so that high-speed spaceships could be built. After all, fast voyages between Earth and the Centaur’s world would require substantial accelerations.

But that didn’t make sense. If the Centaurs had ships capable of even half the speed of light, they could have sent a working model faster than they could have transmitted the plans. Granted, broadcasting information would always be cheaper than shipping physical objects, but it did make her question whether the stiffening was the point of the construct or just a byproduct of what it was really intended to do.