Analog SFF, April 2010 (22 page)

"Well, with dozens of exoplanets being discovered every day between hundreds of astronomers, you'd think that a coincidence would have happened to
someone
. Do I even need the test?"

"I did it. You've less than a thousandth of a percent of seeing the exoplanets you got from your spectra, which means there's a bias in your data taking or processing. Now that lovely hot Jupiter you were writing up about? Wrong, all wrong. I've called the observatory to get them to test their equipment's calibration.” Dr. Onishi was always efficient and quick, a publisher, not a perisher. As a graduate student alone she had refined two methods of detecting exoplanets. I would sleep easier if only I could accomplish half as much.

"There's nothing wrong with my data,” I said, voice rising. “I've checked it over; I'm careful, always."

She pointed a fry-speared, plastic fork at me. It dripped a lump of gravy-drenched cheese onto her desk, which she ignored. “But clearly you can't have seen so many solar systems identical to ours from a random sample. It's an impossibility. Go over it again from the beginning, and then I'll consider sending it off to the Beast. You have a day."

"A day?” I asked. “I'm already late for my hot Jupiter paper."

Dr. Onishi pointed the fork to her clock. “Time's ticking. If you would rather write a paper, I could pass this on..."

It was not the giant clock that told the time she had pointed to, but a smaller one on her other wall I noticed only now. Instead of counting up, it counted down to a time very familiar to me. It seemed I was not the only one with a doomsday clock centered on the BST.

"I'll do it.” I turned to leave.

"One more thing, Mei,” she said. “Next time you've data, look at the whole of it and not just your hot Jupiters."

For the rest of the night, I feverishly reprocessed my raw spectra. The Moon crossed the sky, a pizza delivery came for me, everyone else on the floor went home, and still I worked, fingers flying from keyboard to mouse, and my gaze ran across my monitor.

I did not know I had fallen asleep until I woke up near noon to a pencil jab in my ribs. I wrenched the pencil from the poking hand.

"Hey!” Shakir said.

I held the pencil tip to his neck. “You don't think I'm crazy, do you?"

"It's a great stunt, you have me there. Imagine, saying there are many solar systems like ours out there. This might be the pet theory of yours that's actually convincing."

"It is not a stunt!” I said, standing. “It's the truth. I know what I see. Look at it for yourself."

He scrambled back to his desk. “If these five systems are so similar to ours then they too may be the perfect storms to create life."

"This isn't about finding your little green aliens! This is about overthrowing fucking planetary formation theory!” I tossed him his pencil and furiously started commanding print runs of my past day's work. “Read it!"

"Okay, okay."

"No one asked my opinion.” Ingrid was marking undergraduates’ tests. Her lips moved while she read the papers, circling her pen in the air as she decided the destinies of her disciples. “I think you're crazy."

"Thanks,” I said.

After adding my recalculations, Shakir's proofing, and Dr. Onishi's input, I had a spruced-up proposal that would be irresistible to the BST's gatekeepers. I sent it to them with eight days to go, pointing out other weaker proposals that others had submitted and how I was much more deserving of their time. They responded to me in six days.

"I hate them!” I said, spinning in circles, kicking up the clothes and books that covered my living room floor. “When I'm professor, I'll build my own space telescope, twice as big and shiny with a bow on it, and I'll reject them all. Then they'll know what it feels like.” I sank down into my couch and snapped open a beer bottle. My headphones were jutting into my butt. I ignored them, having much bigger problems.

Shakir had come as soon as he heard the news. He was still standing by my door, eyeing the piles of junk that surrounded him as if he was Zheng He and they the Indian Ocean. I could see the calculation in his eyes as he tried to determine the optimal route to my couch.

"Just step on it,” I said.

"But you never do your laundry,” he said. “I'm afraid if I put my footprint on your clothes it'll be there for a year."

"I hope you like Thai. Here in ten minutes or it's free."

He held up a data-neb. “I brought some entertainment. The complete seasons of
Red Dwarf, Battlestar Gallactica, Dollhouse."

"You're still obsessed with classic television, then?"

He stepped across the mess of the floor, one foot at a time, seeking the maximum number of gaps possible. I shoved stuff off my couch to give him a place next to the beer packs.

We clicked our bottles together.

"To the rejects,” I said.

"The rejects!"

I chugged down half the bottle. A while ago I had discovered a one-to-one monotonically increasing correlation between the quantity of alcohol I consumed and how tolerable Shakir became to me.

"If it helps,” he said, swallowing, “I had a peek at the order lined up for the very moment the Beast goes into operation. They just released it an hour ago. First, they are looking at Andromeda, then the Eagle Nebula, then solar system EPH1889."

"That's one of our five,” I said.

"Guess what?” he asked. “A team from Victoria found two extrasolar Earths on it, like we did. They'll look at the larger one first, and then the smaller one."

"Damn it. I told you I wasn't crazy,” I said. “Even other people have verified at least one of these systems! So we got rejected on basis of overlap."

"Exactly."

The Thai came in eleven minutes and twelve seconds. We had to take our victories where we could. The thing with the Thai food was it was spicy, and the thing with beer was that it tended to dull the heat on one's tongue, and the thing with memory was that it tended to run away when beer knocked on the door.

So I awoke upside down some time in late morning, feet pressed to wall, legs diagonally across couch, shoulders on floor, mouth dry, head throbbing with pain. I turned my head left to see my headphones in my face. I turned my head right to see my bike wheel, having been driven across the floor over my books. The advantage of a messy apartment was that it was invariant under trashing. I carefully eased myself upright.

Shakir lounged back in my desk chair, slumbering in the embrace of someone familiar.

"You are wrapped up in Galileo!"

"Ugg,” Shakir replied, still asleep.

I kicked through empty beer bottles to reach him, unwound the poster off of Shakir carefully so as not to rip it, and frantically tried to smooth Galileo out and reattach him to the freezer. “So sorry,” I told him.

Galileo returned a scowl. Richard winked.

"Who were you talking to?” Shakir asked. He now sat upright, fully awake.

"No one!"

Beside Subrahmanyan's place over my monitor hung a poster of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that mapped out the temperature and brightness of stars. They tended to clot together in groups. The most prominent clots were the white dwarfs, small star-corpses that no longer underwent nuclear fusion; then the supergiants, unusually bright stars in the prime of life; and the largest clot, more of a stream really, the main sequence where most stars spent the majority of their cycle. Our sun was a main-sequence star, would fatten into a red giant in a couple billion years, and later retire as a white dwarf.

Five pins protruded from my diagram. Three were at the main sequence, the fourth was on the verge of the red giant branch, while the fifth sat amongst the T Tauris, a short phase of young stars whose group hardly made an impact on the diagram.

"I don't believe it. First you abuse Galileo, and now you deface my Hertzsprung-Russell diagram?” I asked. “Fracking smeghead."

Shakir turned around to see what I was staring at. “Pin the tail on the star?” he asked with a shrug. “Who's to say that you didn't do that?"

I walked toward it and tripped over Ingrid, who had been sleeping on my floor. She grunted and began to stir. An empty beer can fell off her forehead. I could not recall at which point in the night she had joined us.

"Did
you
do this?” I asked, and ripped the pins from the poster.

I attended the department's BST launch party with a Big Byte chocolate bar in one hand and a giant Pinkberry smoothie in the other. It was six p.m. Around me my fellow astronomers and a number of physicists and mathematicians chattered, the words all going over my head. We filled a lecture hall. There were balloons thrown around, streamers, a snack cart. At the front they were having difficulties navigating the controls of a super-definition projector. I watched them blankly, unmoving, willing it to work. We had already missed the launch of the BST itself into orbit.

"The big day,” Ingrid said, taking the seat beside me. “Cheer up."

"Big for them.” I took a noisy sip from my smoothie.

"You're such a grump."

Shakir sat to my other side. At least
he
looked as upset as I felt. When one was miserable there was nothing more infuriating than the sight of happy people, the inverse of schadenfreude. I did not want to suffer alone.

"Chocolate?” I asked, offering him the bar.

He responded by raising his Big Byte Double Precision.

"You win,” I said.

A balloon bopped me on the head. I seized it with a scowl and popped it with my nails.

The projector's blue screen flickered into a scene at the BST's control room in Vancouver, rows of people at their computer terminals wearing headsets, typing, talking, turning knobs, and flipping switches on their circuit boards.

Cheers erupted in our lecture hall at the sight, and then everyone quieted to watch the projection.

The gray control room suddenly flashed to a red and white scene. Some knowledgeable-looking scientist stood at a podium with our flag behind him. The caption told us that he was Dr. Arnold Masamba, Vice Director of the BST. He adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses, cleared his throat, patted the microphone clipped to his suit collar, and started speaking.

"Initial inspections of the Behemoth Space Telescope have all proven to be positive. The telescope is fully functional. It is receiving directions from headquarters now and in a few moments shall be focusing on the M31 galaxy to take its very first images."

Cut to the control room, once stale but now full of life as its people rose from their seats and started clapping. Cut to a few politicians, smiling as photographers snapped their pictures. Cut to an image of the Beast, freefalling in Earth's orbit. Cut to Dr. Masamba again, taking questions from reporters.

I threw my empty smoothie bottle to the floor.

They showed us infrared Andromeda. It was beautiful, and after a delay we saw the Eagle Nebula and it was glorious, but I hardly paid attention. I was awaiting one thing: EPH1889's turn.

Because planets at the distance of solar system EPH1889 were still point sources to us, we would not see an image in terms of space like the images for Andromeda and the Eagle Nebula, which were larger objects in the sky. Instead what the BST was doing now was gathering the intensity of electromagnetic radiation from this particular point source planet in each wavelength to produce my sought-after blackbody spectrum.

When this came up on the screen it was less impressive than the imagery of the galaxy and nebula. This was rough, for the scientific processing would take days, but the distinctive blackbody-hill was there, along with the absorption lines from materials in the planet's atmosphere. I noticed lines in the spectrum from carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone. The rest of the mess I was unfamiliar with, but I knew enough to see that even in atmosphere this exoplanet was similar to Earths.

"Chlorofluorocarbons!” Ingrid cried.

"Ow, my ear,” I said. “What . . . chloroflablah?"

"CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons,” she said, trying to speak up over the erupting chatter around us as others got excited. People were leaping out their chairs, screaming. “I recognize their signature in the absorption lines. They're a group of anthropogenic compounds from the twentieth century used for refrigeration, cleaners, aerosols; huge ozone gobblers."

I could feel my heart pound faster. “Truly?"

"That got them banned in the 1980s Montreal Protocol."

"Let me backtrack for a moment. So when you said they were anthropogenic..."

"CFCs don't occur naturally. Synthetic."

"Intelligent life,” Shakir shouted. “They just discovered extraterrestrials!"

"It should have been us,” I whispered with a sigh.

News spreads fast. This was the sort of news you call all your friends and family for in the middle of the night. This was the sort of news everyone checked for on the Internet every minute to seize every last drop of updates, while getting hammered with their friends. Aliens were on par with the discovery of the wheel; only there had been no media in ancient Mesopotamia.

I never bought newspapers, since they were sensationalized lies, but on my bike waiting at the traffic lights on my way to work the following afternoon, I caught glimpses of the headlines in people's hands or sitting in the newspaper boxes, when I was not coughing from the smog.

Aliens! Aliens! Aliens!

Behemoth Space Telescope Finds Extraterrestrials

We Are Not Alone

E.T. Phones Earth

First Evidence For Life on Other Worlds

Aliens Better Not Be Protestant: Pope

Extraterrestrial and the Beast

Will They Come in Peace?

New Space Telescope Takes Shocking Images of Life in Distant Solar System

Beast Sniffs Out Aliens

In the office, Ingrid had some familiar plots up on her monitors.

"Aren't those the spectra from the Beast last night?” I asked, leaning on her chair. “They released them to just any scientist?"

"I'm not just any scientist!” Ingrid said indignantly, tapping a pen on her monitor. “After the traces of several synthetic chemicals were confirmed on the first, larger of the two extrasolar Earths in the EPH1889 system, everyone ignored the blackbody spectra of the smaller one. Here it is. See those large gaps? That comes from absorption in an atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide, with a copious concentration of sulphuric acid."