Gateways (35 page)

No one was happy, but given my threats, no one complained. On a private channel, I could see Jim Russell’s messaging the cook and staff. I passed around a box of Myanmar cigars I’d brought along. Of course no one but me would touch them. I lit up and for a minute or so they stared at each other, silent except for the coughing of wimps. Finally, one of the Japanese contingent said, “So, how about them Dodgers?”

Ohara and Park just looked sullen. Every few seconds the ground somewhere beneath the
Frederik Pohl
gave a wiggle, reminding us all that whatever the seismo estimates, this was a world where evidence could disappear on short notice.

As Cookie had the drinks brought in, Ohara leaned back and said, “Seriously, Captain, we’re going to have to settle some of this quite soon.” He waved again at the aquarium. Sitting in the middle of it was a greenish critter that looked like a refugee from a very old science fiction video. Ohara’s people called it Frito—I have no idea why. In truth, if it were not fraudulent, Frito was the the most extraordinary living thing ever seen by humans. I noticed that the creature was not nearly as lively as it had been in the discovery video. I bet myself that Ron hadn’t figured how to keep the poor fake supplied with enough oxygen.

“Just be cool, Ron.” If I could get everyone through dinner . . .

Then I noticed Cookie was looking at me nervously. His voice came in my ear, on a private voice channel. “Sorry, Captain, but I can’t find any more banquet-class food.”

We routinely stocked high-class dinners for passengers, and fresh food for the crew too. Given the short voyage times, there was no need for anything less. I gave Cookie an unbelieving glare.

“The victuals are here someplace, ma’am,” continued Cookie’s private communication. “It’s the new container system that’s screwed us.”

I gave Cookie another look, and then turned back Ohara: “We’ll return to the resource issues right after a good meal. Our staff has planned something special for us tonight. Isn’t that right, Cookie?”

Cookie Smith has been with me from the beginning. He doesn’t give a damn about starflight or science, but he’s a real chef. And he knows how to put on a good front. He gave everybody a big grin. “Yes, ma’am, the very best.” He and his white-jacketed assistants made their exit. Cookie’s parting comment was private, and it wasn’t quite so confident: “I’ll keep looking, Captain.”

Even if logistics had screwed up the luxuries, Cookie could probably work some kind of miracle with standard rations. The problem was that for now I had to string these guys along with weak wine and sparkling conversation. Actually, that would have been easy on the flight out. Having a captain’s table does amazing things for the egos of most passengers. (It also keeps the passengers out of the way of my crew, but that’s another story.) This gang of academics was full of theories. Until today their arguments had been in the context of collegial socialization; it’s what they got paid to do at their universities, after all. The trick was for me to put them back in that abstract mood, not raging about who was going to get what equipment in the next twelve hours.

“So,” I said, looking around the table, “today has truly been a great day for science.” I dimmed the lights a bit. Now the window light provided most of the illumination, a panoramic view from the ship’s sensor mast. The result was a perfect illusion of looking out glass windows onto the last of the sunset twilight. Not counting my cigar smoke rafting around the table, it was a supernally clear evening. I noticed Trevor Dhatri repositioning his cameras. He had been sucking in the all the Ohara-Park vitriol, but now he was looking outward. And I have to say that this quiet twilight didn’t need Trevor’s magic touch.

I waved at the sky. “Space, the final frontier.” The words will forever send a shiver down my back. “If you look carefully, you can see the stars just coming out.” You really could. I was filtering the video stream through an enhancement program—just enough of a boost so you could see the stars as they would appear in the deeper dark, after your eyes adjusted. “We are four hundred light-years from Earth, yet there’s not a single recognizable
constellation. Unless you’re an observational astronomer, you probably couldn’t find anything recognizable. Our generation has gone where no one has gone before. Humankind now has answers to questions that have bedeviled us since the beginning of time. We,
here
,
today
, have added immensely to those answers. What would we—who know the answers—say if we could talk to earlier generations?”

One of Park’s guys piped up with, “We’d say that we have only partial answers ourselves.”

“True,” came a voice from the far end of the table, “but we know enough to render a preliminary assessment, real answers after generations of uncertainty.” That was Jim Russell, bless him.

I picked up on Jim’s point: “We have hard numbers to assess even the uncertainties. Take the central equation that bioscientists have used to summarize the mystery of life in the universe.”

“The Venter-Boston relation?”

“No, no. Before that.” These guys knew way too much about Venter-Boston. “I’m thinking of the Drake equation—you know, for the number of civilizations with which communication might be possible.”

Silence all around.

“Okay,” Dae Park finally said, “that’s a good question. More general than Venter-Boston.”

For a wonder, Ron Ohara seemed to agree: “Yeah. I . . . guess since the stardrive was invented, we scientists have become so focused on the near term that we don’t talk about the questions that really drive the whole enterprise.”

“Then now might be a good time to see where we stand,” said Dhatri. He sounded sincerely interested in pursuing the topic. I could also see that he was rearranging his cameras. “Somebody scare up a definition of the Drake equation and let’s supply some answers.”

Now if we’d been back on Earth, I’m sure everyone would’ve had that definition instantly. Groundhogs don’t appreciate the solitude of deep space. In deep space, you don’t have an instant link to the Internet. It can take hours or days to get home. I take considerable satisfaction from this fact. You don’t have to put up with the incessant din of social networking and trivia searches. But some people can’t tolerate the isolation. Many cope by hauling around petabytes of crap that they grab from the web before shipping out. On this occasion, I was grateful for their presence. After a moment, one of the Internet cache boobies popped up a definition from Wikipedia:

The Drake Equation (1960):

The number of civilizations in our galaxy with which
communication might be possible can be expressed as

the product of the average rate of star formation times
fp*ne*fl*fi*fc*L

where

fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets;

ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets;

fl is the fraction of the above that go on to develop life at some point;

fi is the fraction of the above that go on to develop intelligent life;

fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space;

L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The letters floated silvery in my cigar smoke.

I had not seen the Drake equation in a long time. From the murmuring around the cabin, I could tell that many of the younger folks had never seen it. The equation reached beyond their nearsighted concerns.

Park gave a little laugh. “So how many systems have APA and the other agencies explored?”

That’s a question
I
could answer, since I tracked my ship’s standing: “As of this month? Fifteen hundred and two. If you count robot probes”—which I don’t since the robots can miss what trained explorers might notice—“maybe four thousand.”

Park shrugged. “Four thousand out of hundreds of billions.”

“But with the newest versions of the stardrive we can easily reach any point in the galaxy.” That was Hugo Mendes, our staff astronomer. We’d need him if there were navigation problems and we wound up someplace
really
far from home. “I agree with Mr. Russell. We’ve seen enough to make some good estimates . . .” He paused, reading the definitions. “You know, some of those factors aren’t very useful.”

One of Park’s protégés said, “Yes, but that’s half the fun, seeing how the truth affects the Old Timers’ questions.

And in a few minutes, they were all absorbed by this long-ago vision of our present.

The first factor, “fp,” got a big laugh. “Almost every normal star has planets,” Mendes said. “Lots of planets. Too many planets, crashing around,
with wild-ass orbits and ejections. As stars migrate around the HR diagram, a lot of them even have second and third generations of planets.”

Dae Park was nodding. “I remember reading how back in the nineteenth century, the great mathematicians tried to prove the long-term stability of our solar system. They never did, but no one realized that it wasn’t a failure in their math. Only one in a hundred planetary systems lucks into stability for even a billion years.”

Now in the floating Wiki extract, someone annotated “fp” with a smiley face and the comment “near 1.0, but so what?”

Trevor leaned forward, “That second factor, ‘ne,’ that’s just about zero if you count all the unstable planetary systems that Hugo said.”

“Okay, so just count the systems that stay stable long enough to be interesting.”

No one said anything for a moment. Then, “Hmm, you know, if you count importing life, like we’re trying to do nowadays on our colony worlds, ne might be near one.” That was Jim Russell again. I couldn’t tell if he was just working to hold up the discussion or if he were seriously intrigued.

“Yeah, with terraforming. That’s cheating.”

Just then Cookie’s voice sounded in my ear. “Captain! I think I found where the logistic jackasses stored our banquet supplies. I’ve brought the containers up to the galley. It’s not everything, but I can put together a nice meal, maybe a little short on dessert.”

I leaned back from the table and muttered a response: “Excellent. Go ahead with what you’ve got.” I really didn’t care about dessert, that probably being past the time where pacifying distractions would be useful.

I missed whatever the group decided about “ne.” They had moved on to “fl,” the fraction of habitable worlds that “actually go on to develop life at some point.” Oops, was this a problem? Park and Ohara were already growling at each other.

I banged my wineglass on the table. “Ladies and gentlemen! Professors! Isn’t factor ‘fl’ the simplest of all?”

Jim picked up on that. “Well, yes. The interstellar medium—at least where we’ve been—has enough simple organics that almost any habitable planet evolves bacterial activity. So factor ‘fl’ is essentially one. Certainty.”

“Only technically speaking,” that from one of Ohara’s techs. “Sure, things like bacteria and archaea pop up very early, but they never go on to anything more. Before Paradise, we never found evidence of a transition to eukaryotes, much less metazoa. But today, all that is changed thanks to
Professor Ohara’s magnificent discovery.” The tech waved expansively at Frito’s vaguely glowing form.

I expected some kind of explosion from the Park camp, but Dae responded almost mildly: “We’ll. . . see about Professor Ohara’s unbelievable claims, but I agree with the rest. Today we’ve shown that there are places off Earth where something more advanced than simple bacteria can exist—or has existed. The transition is possible. After today, I would put a meaningful value for factor ‘fl’ to be at least one in one hundred.”

There were nods around the table. Since we had discovered ten Brin worlds and another handful that had had surface water for some time, her numbers made sense.

“Very good,” I said, moving right along before Ohara could respond, “that gets us to more interesting territory, namely factor ‘fi,’ the fraction of life-bearing worlds that develop intelligent life.”

Trevor laughed. “I consider Earth to be such a world, but if it’s not to be counted in this arithmetic—” He sounded discouraged for a moment. “All the thousands of worlds we’ve visited the last fifteen years. And yet we’ve come up with nothing.” Strange. Trevor Dhatri had seemed such an unrestrained cheerleader. I hadn’t thought he’d take note of failure—though somehow I doubted this little speech would show up in his online show. He paused and sounded a bit more chipper; maybe he’d figured how to spin this. “On the other hand, what we’ve discovered today gives me faith that the possibility of alien intelligent life is greater than zero. If we can just get a large enough baseline, a large enough sample size, we’ll find our peers in the universe.”

“It doesn’t matter. I think we are effectively alone.” This was Hugo Mendes. “You talk about how many worlds we’ve looked at. Fine. But in fact, we have visual access almost to the cosmological horizon—and nowadays we have observatories that can watch all that, every second. If there were an intelligent civilization anywhere, don’t you think it would ask the same questions we do? Wouldn’t it make signals we could recognize? But we don’t get anything. Whatever the other factors, I don’t think there are other civilizations in the observable universe, at least none that make signals.” He waved at the silvery formula. Factor “fc” got the annotation: “Zero or as close as makes no difference.”

We were getting near the end of the list. I really didn’t want to resume the argument about who deserved to hog the research gear. Give them some time to cool off and I could pull a Solomon on them, dividing everything down the middle—which would leave Park with enough to do some
real science. I gave Cookie a poke on my private voice channel: “When will you be in with the first course? Appetizers at least?”

“Not more’n five minutes, ma’am! I promise.” Cookie sounded breathless.