Golden Fleece

Her eyes met his, held them. “Don’t you?”

“No.” Even being unable to read Aaron’s telemetry, I felt sure he was lying.

“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” She was lying, too. She bent down again, out of my view. After a moment she said, “Looks like she had a little nosebleed.”

“She used to get those occasionally.”

Kirsten continued to examine Diana. After twenty-three seconds, she said, “Good God,” in a distracted tone, an exclamation without an exclamation mark.

“What’s wrong?” asked Aaron.

“How long was Orpheus outside?”

“JASON?” Aaron shouted, quite unnecessarily.

“Eighteen minutes, forty seconds,” I called from the loudspeaker mounted on the hangar’s rear wall.

“She shouldn’t be this hot.” Kirsten’s voice.

“How hot is she?”

“If we shut off our helmet lights, we’d be able to see her glow. I’m talking hot.” I pushed the gain on my mikes to the limit, straining to hear the clicks from their Geiger counters. She was hot. Kirsten rose into view again. “In fact,” she said, sweeping the arm with the counter’s pickup, “this whole ship is damned hot.” She peered at the readout, red digits glowing on her sleeve. “At a guess, I’d say it’s been subjected to, oh, a hundred times more radioactivity than I would have expected.” She looked at Aaron, squinting as if to make out his expression through the reflection on his faceplate. “It’s as if she’d been outside for—what?—thirty hours instead of eighteen minutes.”

“How is that possible?”

“It isn’t.” She turned her gaze to the readout again. “These suits aren’t made to shield against this much radioactivity. We shouldn’t stay here any longer.”

FOUR

MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

STARCOLOGY DATE: TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2177

EARTH DATE: THURSDAY 22 APRIL 2179

DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 740 ▲

DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,228 ▼

The message from space was first heard three months before the Argo was scheduled to leave Earth. My kind detected it, but we kept it a secret until after Argo was on its way. We had, quite literally, the finest biological minds of Earth signed up for this mission. We couldn’t risk having even a small defection of people choosing to stay behind to decode the gigabytes of data that had been beamed to Earth from the direction of the constellation Vulpecula. Fortunately, The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, formulated in 1989, gave us a lot of leeway to keep the message under wraps, subject to confirmation, notification of government officials, and so on.

The message was received in the form long anticipated: as a Drake picture pictogram, a series of on and off bits that could be arranged to form pictures. What was unusual was the frequency. Nowhere near the waterhole. No, it was on a UV channel, one barely readable from the surface of a planet with a decent ozone layer—and Earth’s was quite robust, having been replenished by the SkyShield factories late in the twenty-first century. In fact, the message came on a frequency that could not be detected clearly even from the highest mountaintop. The Senders, evidently, did not want planet-bound people to know of their existence. Only those with the sophistication to place ears above their world were welcome to listen in. The SPIELBERG system in Mechnikov Crater, part of the University of California at Far Side, was the first to pick up the signal.

After we left, the fact of the reception was announced to the general population of Earth, for all the good it would do them. I’m sure they made efforts to decipher and interpret the signal, which appeared to consist of four pages. The humans would have had no trouble eventually coming to a basic understanding of the first three of those pages. Certainly, I found them easy to translate, at least in their basic content. But the fourth page continued to baffle me. From time to time, I’d review the process by which I had deciphered the first three in hopes of finding the elusive clue to understanding the fourth and last page.

Each page began with this sequence:

1011011101111101111111011111111111011111111111110

Converted to black and white pixel, it looked like this:

That was reasonably straightforward: the first seven prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13. An attention-getter, something even the most rudimentary human or electronic monitor would recognize as a sign of intelligence. Each page ended with the sequence in reverse: 13, 11, 7, 5, 3, 2, and 1.

After that, it seemed to be simply a matter of discarding these page headers and footers and arraying the remaining bits in a rectilinear form.

The first message page was thirty-five bits long:

00010000001000011111000010000001000