“We can’t even find those planets, Ivo. It’s the old needle-in-haystack problem. Do you have any proper idea how many stars and how much dust there is in the galaxy? We can’t begin to use our vaunted definition until we know exactly where to focus it. It would take us years of educated searching to spot any significant proportion of the planets beyond our own system, and there’s such a demand for time on this instrument that we can’t afford to waste it that way.”
“Um. I remember when I dropped a penny in an overgrown lot. I knew where it was, within ten feet, but I had to catch a bus in five minutes. Don’t think I’ve ever been so mad and frustrated since!” His fingers felt the coin in his pocket again: he had missed the bus but found the penny, and he still had it.
“Make that penny a bee-bee shot, and that lot the Sahara desert, and instead of a bus, a jet-plane strafing you, and you have a suggestion of the picture.”
“Now who’s using violent imagery? I’ll buy the bee-bee and the desert — but the jet fighter?”
“I’ll get to that pretty soon. That’s why we need Schön. Anyway, we’d need thousands of macroscopes to afford that type of exploration, and even this one is precariously funded. There’s more important research afoot.”
“More important than geology, when the Earth’s resources are terminal? Than the secrets of the universe? Than questing into space in the hope that somewhere there is intelligent life; than the possible verification that we are not unique in the universe, not alone?” He paused, abruptly making a quite different connection. “Brad, you don’t mean there’s political interference?”
“There is, and it’s serious, but I wasn’t thinking of that. Sure, we can snoop out military secrets and get the dirt on public figures — but we don’t. I admit I picked up a dandy shot of a starlet taking a shower once, and you’d be surprised what goes on in the average suburban family situation at the right hour. But aside from the ethics of it, this is picayune stuff. It would be ridiculous to try to spy on the antics of three billion people with this thing, for the same reason we can’t try to map the planets of the galaxy. Be like using the H-bomb to drive out bedbugs. No, we’re thinking big: interstellar communication.”
Ivo felt a cold thrill. “You have made alien contact! How far away are they? What about the time delay? Do they — ?”
Brad’s smile was bright under the goggles. “Ease off, lad. I didn’t say we’d made contact, I said we were thinking of it, and we haven’t forgotten the time-delay problem for a moment.” His hands began to play upon the controls. “I have hinted at some of the problems of routine exploration and charting, but we do have techniques that are nonroutine. Time delay or no, we have a pretty good notion of the criteria of life as we know it, and — well, look.”
The screen became a frame around an alien landscape. In the foreground rose a gnarled treelike trunk of yellow hue and grotesque convolution. Behind it were reddish shrubs whose stems resembled twisted noodles dipped in glue. The sky was light blue, with several fluffy white clouds, but Ivo was certain this was not Earth. There was an alienness about it that both fascinated him and grated upon his sensibilities, though he could not honestly identify anything extraordinary apart from the vegetation.
“All right,” he said at last. “What is it?”
“Planet Johnson, ten light-minutes out from an F8 star about two thousand light-years from us.”
“I mean, what is it that bothers me about it? I know it’s alien, but I don’t know how I know.”
“Your eye is reacting to the proportions of the vegetation. This is a slightly larger world than ours, and the atmosphere is thicker, so the trunk and stems are braced against greater weight and heftier wind-pressure, and react differently than would an Earth-plant in a similar situation.”
“So that’s how I knew!” he laughed.
Brad manipulated the controls again and the scene switched. This was a higher view of a grassy plain, though it was odd grass, with stalagmites rising randomly from it Low mountains showed in the hazy distance.
“Earth or alien?” Brad inquired, teasing him.
“Alien — but I can’t tell a thing about the air or gravity, even unconsciously. What is it this time?”
“Those projections have two shadows.”
Ivo made a gesture of knocking sawdust from his ear.
“This is Planet Holt. There are some fine specimens of pseudo-mammalian herbivores here, but I’d have to search for them and it isn’t worth the effort right now. I’d probably lose the image entirely if I took it off automatic. This one circles a G3 star five thousand light-years away.”
“So this picture is five thousand years old?”
“This scene is, yes, since it takes that long for the macronic impulse to reach us. I told you we traveled in time, here.”
Brad returned to the controls, but Ivo stopped him. “Hold it, glibtongue! If this planet circles one, count it, one star — where does that second shadow come from?”
“Thought you’d never ask. There is a reflective cliff behind our pickup spot — another typical outcropping of Holt’s crust.”
“So my subconscious reasoning was spurious after all. How many of these things have you found?”
“Earthlike planets? Almost a thousand so far.”
“You told me you couldn’t locate planets—”
“Particular planets we can’t. But with luck and sound analysis, we get a few. These are only a minuscule fraction of those available, and we’ve probably missed most of the closest ones, but chance plays a dictatorial part in such discoveries. Our thousand planets are merely a random selection of the billions we know are there.”
“And they all have trees and animals?”
“Hardly. We only name the important ones. Less than two hundred have any life at all we can recognize, and only forty-one of those have land-based animals. Chief specialization seems to be size. I can show you monsters—”
“Maybe next time. I like monsters; I feel a personal affinity for them because they always get the negative characterizations in the science fiction reruns. I could romp with them for hours. But to the point: have you found intelligence?”
“Yes. Watch.” Brad shifted scenes.
A tremendous hive appeared. Walls and tunnels were built upon themselves in a mountain, and fluid filled many wholly or in part. Strange squidlike creatures splashed and swam and climbed through the maze, disappearing and reappearing so thickly that Ivo could not tell whether he ever saw the same individual twice.
“This is Planet Sung, about ten thousand light-years distant. We have studied it with ferocious intensity the past few months, and we don’t much like the implications. They are quite alarming, in fact.”
The image was traveling over the planet, showing open water and desert land, with frequent warren-mountains inhabited tightly by the semi-aquatic creatures. Ivo was reminded of pictures he had seen of the beaches where walruses congregated; no vegetation showed at all. He wondered what the Sung denizens ate.
“This is intelligence? I haven’t seen anything very alarming or even impressive, yet. Just a termite-society with very little pasture. Surely they aren’t planning to loft a bomb at Earth?” But his scoffing covered what was beginning to be a discomforting degree of awe. This was a genuine extraterrestrial planetary species, and the very realization of its existence was nearly overwhelming.
“They hardly care about Earth. Remember, we were in our tedious prehistory at the time we see them now. I have no doubt that they are extinct at present.”
The picture framed an individual burrow. Close up, the occupants seemed a lot less like seals or squids. Their bodies were fishlike but seemingly clumsy, with heavy fins or flippers at the sides and a trunklike tube behind. Two great frog-eyes were mounted on top, pointing mainly backward. The tube appeared to be prehensile, like the proboscis of an elephant.