One of the oldest dreams of mankind, this remained no more than a dream until the rise of radio astronomy, in the second half of the twentieth century. Then, within the short span of two decades, the combined skills of the engineers and the scientists gave humanity power to span the interstellar gulfs if it was willing to pay the price.
The first puny radio telescopes, a few tens of meters in diameter, had listened hopefully for signals from the stars. No one had really
expected success from these pioneering efforts, nor was it achieved. Making certain plausible assumptions about the distribution of intelligence in the Galaxy, it was easy to calculate that the detection of a radio-emitting civilization would require telescopes not decameters, but kilometers, in aperture.
There was only one practical method of achieving this resultat least, with structures confined to the surface of the Earth. To build a single giant bowl was out of the question, but the same result could be obtained from an array of hundreds of smaller ones. CYCLOPS was visualized as an antenna “farm” of hundred-meter dishes, uniformly spaced over a circle perhaps five kilometers across. The faint signals from each element in this army of antennas would be added together, and then cunningly processed by computers programmed to look for the unique signatures of intelligence against the background of cosmic noise.
The whole system would cost as much as the original Apollo Project. But unlike Apollo, it could proceed in installments, over a period of years or even decades. As soon as a relatively few antennas had been built, CYCLOPS could start operating. From the very beginning, it would be a tool of immense value to the radio astonomers. Over the years, more and more antennas could be installed, until eventually the whole array was filled in; and all the while CYCLOPS would steadily increase in power and capability, able to probe deeper and deeper into the universe.
It was a noble vision, though there were some who feared its success as much as its possible failure. However, during the Time of Troubles that brought the twentieth century to its unlamented close, there was little hope of funding such a project. It could be considered only during a period of political and financial stability; and therefore CYCLOPS did not get under way until a hundred years after the initial design studies.
A child of the brief but brilliant Muslim Renaissance, it helped to absorb some of the immense wealth accumulated by the Arab countries
during the 238 Oil Age. The millions of tons of metal required came from the virtually limitless resources of the Red Sea brines, oozing along the Great Rift
Valley. Here, where the crust of the Earth was literally coming apart at the seams as the continental plates slowly separated, were metals and minerals enough to banish all fear of shortages for centuries to come.
Ideally CYCLOPS should have been situated on the Equator, so that its questing radio mirrors could sweep the heavens from pole to pole. Other requirements were a good climate, freedom from earthquakes or other natural disasters-and, if possible, a ring of mountains to act as a shield against radio interference. Of course, no perfect site existed, and political, geographical, and engineering compromises had to be made. After decades of often acrimonious discussion, the desolate “Empty Quarter” of Saudi Arabia was chosen; it was the first time that anyone had ever found a use for it.
Wide tracks were roughly graded through the wilderness so that ten-thousand-ton hover-freighters could carry in components from the factories on the shore of the Red Sea. Later, these were supplemented by cargo airships. In the first phase of the project, sixty parabolic antennas were arranged in the form of a giant cross, it’s five-kilometer arms extending north-south, east-west. Some of the faithful objected to this symbol of an alien religion, but it was explained to them that this was only a temporary state of affairs. When the “Eye of Allah” was completed, the offending sign would be utterly lost in the total array of seven hundred huge dishes, spaced uniformly over a circle eighty square kilometers in extent.
By the end of the twenty-first century, however, only half of the planned seven hundred elements had been installed. Two hundred of them had filled in most of the central core of the array, and the rest formed a kind of picket fence, outlining the circumference of the giant instrument. This reduction in scale, while saving billions of so lars had degraded performance only slightly. CYCLOPS had fulfilled
virtually all its design objectives, and during the course of the twenty-second century had wrought almost as great a revolution in astronomy as had the reflectors on Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar, two hundred years earlier. By the end of that century, however, it had run into trouble-through no fault of its builders, or of the army of engineers and scientists who served it.
CYCLOPS could not compete with the systems that had now been built on the far side of the Moonalmost perfectly shielded from terrestrial interference by three thousand kilometers of solid rock. For many decades, it had worked in conjunction with them, for two great telescopes at either end of an
Earth-Moon baseline formed an interferometer that could probe details of planetary systems hundreds of light-years away. But now there were radio telescopes on Mars; the Lunar observatory could achieve far more with their cooperation than it could ever do with nearby Earth. A baseline two hundred million kilometers long allowed one to survey the surrounding stars with a precision never before imagined.
As happens sooner or later with all scientific instruments, technical developments had by-passed CYCLOPS. But by the mid-twenty-third century it was facing another problem, which might well prove fatal. The Empty Quarter was no longer a desert.
CYCLOPS had been built in a region which might see no rains for five years at a time. At Al Hadidah, there were meteorites that had lain un rusting in the sand since the days of the Prophet. All this had been changed by reforestation and climate control; for the first time since the Ice Ages, the deserts were in re treat. More rain now fell on the Empty Quarter in days than had once fallen in years.
The makers of CYCLOPS had never anticipated this.
They had, reasonably enough, based all their designs on a hot, and environment. Now the maintenance staff was engaged in a continual battle against corrosion humidity in coaxial cables, fungus-induced breakdowns in high-tension circuits, and all the other ills that afflict electronic equipment if given the slightest chance. Some of the hundred-meter antennas had even rusted up solidly, so that they
could no longer be moved and had to be taken out of service. For almost twenty years, the system had been working at slowly decreasing efficiency, while the engineers, administrators, and scientists carried out a triangular argument, no one party being able to convince either of the others. Was it worth investing billions of so lars to refurbish the system—or would the money be better spent on the other side of the Moon? It was impossible to arrive at any clear-cut decision, for no one had ever been able to put a value on pure scientific research.
Whatever its present problems, CYCLOPs had been a spectacular success, helping reshape man’s views of the universe not once, but many times. It had pushed back the frontiers of knowledge to the very microsecond after the Big Bang itself, and had trapped radio waves that had circumnavigated the entire span of creation. It had probed the surfaces of distant stars, detected their hidden planets, and discovered such strange entities as neutrino suns, anti tachyons gravitational lenses, space quakes and revealed the mind-wrenching realms of negative-probability “Ghost” states and inverted matter.