A Voice in the Night

THE PEGASUS PROJECT

I was sitting on the porch of the End Times Hotel with Abe Willis when the message from Harlow came in: Ronda, we might have aliens. Seriously. We picked up a radio transmission yesterday from the Sigmund Cluster. It tracks to ISKR221/722. A yellow dwarf, 7,000 light-years out. We haven’t been able to break it down, but it’s clearly artificial. You’re closer to the Cluster than anybody else by a considerable distance. Please take a look. If it turns out to be what we’re hoping, try not to let them know you’re there. Good luck. And by the way, keep this to yourself.

“What is it?” asked Abe.

“Aliens.”

He laughed. “Okay. I understand you don’t want to tell me.” The black hole was setting behind the mountains. “People are going to love this place. How long can you give me?”

We were munching pizza. The sun was on the other side of the sky, floating serenely above the ocean. “Eleven years,” I said.

Abe was one of those guys who never got a response he liked. Eleven years had to be better than anything he’d expected. Nevertheless he scratched his cheek and looked into his beer as if I’d surprised him with news that would shut down his project. “Last week you were saying fifteen.”

“Last week I was saying how much time you’d have before this place gets swallowed. But you don’t want to be here during the last few years. There’ll be quakes and incoming rocks and God knows what else. You should be safe for eleven. If you want to argue with me, I can cut it back to ten.”

“No. Please, Ronda. I wasn’t trying to create a problem.”

“We don’t want anybody getting killed, Abe. I can’t certify you beyond that point.”

“Of course. I understand.” He showed me a sad smile. Poor guy never got a break. “We can live with it.” Somehow the limits imposed by the black hole had become my fault.

I stared at him. “When are you going to install the other hotels?”

“By Friday. Reservation requests are already an avalanche.” He gives me another smile and suddenly we were living in a happy world again. Abe was a planner for Interstellar Odysseys, which provided deep space vacations for people who were seriously interested in getting away from routine visits to sea shores, gambling casinos, and planetary ring systems. The planet, which had been named Harmony by someone with a serious sense of humor, had vast mountain ranges, wide sweeping plains, and broad oceans. It looked beautiful. “I wish,” Abe continued, “that the sun wasn’t going to come apart so quickly. I’m glad we’ll get to see it, but it would have been helpful if we’d been able to keep the cheerful skies a bit longer.”

The K-class sun had three years left.

The black hole was KR-61, the only one within reasonable range that was currently doing some damage.

I’d been assigned to certify the project as safe. That had meant spending several weeks in the area, measuring orbits and trajectories of thousands of objects to determine whether a vacation site on Harmony would be in any immediate danger. The fact that the planet itself was doomed, Abe had explained, increased the interest. They’d already begun the commercial pitch. ‘Everybody wants to come to Harmony.’

We finished the pizza and the beer, signed the documents, and shook hands. “Thanks, Ronda,” he said. “Have a pleasant trip home. And say hello to Aiko for me.” Aiko was my pilot. “If you’d like to come back for a few days, we’d love to have you. No charge. Just give me a call.”

I told him I wasn’t much of a black hole person, and retreated to the launch area. Aiko was waiting beside the lander. “You read the message?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We going to follow up?”

I climbed inside. “He doesn’t give us much choice.”

“It’s a waste of time.” Aiko got in behind me. She was only on her second mission but no one would ever accuse her of being reticent. Technically, on board, she was in charge, and her tone tended to change as she closed the hatch. “There’s nothing out there.” She was attractive, with black hair, blue eyes and animated features, with better things to do than charge around the galaxy on bogus missions.

“Hello, Ronda,” said Bryan. He was our ship’s AI.

“Hi, Bryan. How you doing?”

“To be honest, I’ll be happy to get away from here. I don’t like black holes.”

“I assume,” said Aiko, “that Abe’s happy with the results.”

“He’s fine. He’s complaining, but it couldn’t have worked out better.”

“Why’s that?”

“Having the catastrophe more or less imminent increases the sales value. If the end of the world is too far away, people lose interest. He’s pretending to be unhappy that he didn’t have more time, but actually he’s fine with it.”

The overhead opened. Aiko sat down in the cockpit and we lifted off. A light breeze was blowing in across the ocean. Take the black hole out of the equation and add some native life and some engineering and Harmony could be converted into a garden world.

We rose through a clear sky. Below, the dome enclosing the hotel gleamed in the sunlight. The other units would be installed in the same general area, one on a mountaintop, the other on the edge of the ocean.

I waited for Aiko to turn things over to Bryan and come back into the cabin. When she did, she sat down across from me and smiled. She knew exactly what I was thinking. “We’ll need about six weeks to get there,” she said.

“Okay.”

She leaned forward and sighed. “Does this kind of thing happen regularly, Ronda?”

I laughed. “Aliens? Sure. Every few thousand years.”

“I’m serious. Is this normal? To get sent out on an idiot mission?”

Everybody knew there were no aliens. “It happens sometimes,” I said.

“Harlow said it was a radio transmission.”

“That’s correct.”

“So if they’ve got the source right, the signal was sent seven thousand years ago.” The smile widened. “I hope they’re not still waiting for us to show up.”

We were on our way minutes after we got back to the Brinkmann. Aiko was as happy as I was to get clear of Harmony. It was a beautiful world, but it looked a lot like Marikim, except, of course, that there was no life, other than Abe and his crew. And sometimes I wondered about them. Despite the sterility, neither of us liked to think about its being sucked into the black hole. I’ll never understand why anyone would pay to go see that.

Aiko decided it was time to change the subject. “You know, I’ve never understood why we’re so hung up on looking for aliens. We’ve been at it now for what? About fifteen thousand years? They just ain’t out there, baby.”

No, they weren’t. We’d been through this experience before, the artificial transmission that turned out to have originated in a long forgotten space station somewhere or a local signal that had simply been bouncing around. There’d been a couple for which there’d been no explanation, but which had never repeated. Missions sent to track them down had found nothing. “I guess we don’t like being alone,” I said. “It can be depressing.”

“Yeah, Ronda. I guess it can. To be honest, it’s not something I think about much.” The message was clear enough: Aiko rarely spent time alone.

We’d come a long way from the home world. The places we occupied were beautiful now, covered with oak trees and evergreens, filled with animals. But every bird and shrub and dolphin that existed anywhere had come from Earth’s forests and oceans. We hadn’t found so much as a blade of grass or even a cell anywhere else.

I don’t know if people ever thought about it much. It’s simply the accepted reality. The universe is ours, to do with as we like.

We didn’t have a lot to occupy the time so I began reading about the early days on Earth, when scientists expected to find signs of ancient life buried in the sands of Mars. Mars had been the home for living creatures in much of the fiction written during that era, before we got offworld. But when we arrived there, of course, there’d been nothing.

Europa had oceans under its ice. It was one of the moons of a gas giant in the solar system. But they’d found nothing there, either. The most serious jolt, according to the histories, had come when, in the pre-FTL era, we made it out to Gliese 832 with an automated vehicle. An Earth-type world, orbiting in the Goldilocks Zone, had displayed oceans and land masses. But when the Ranger arrived, it found no indication of life. No trees, nothing moving anywhere. The report from the robot arrived home sixteen years later and disappointed everyone.

Aiko couldn’t help laughing. “They really thought we were going to find squirrels on Mars?”

“Not exactly. But I think they expected to find something.”

People began asking what kind of universe we lived in? The report from the Ranger set off a religious revival which continued to gain ground as evidence mounted that something special had happened on Earth.

Scientists figured out what it takes for life to begin. They realized that the odds of chemistry and climate and various other factors coming together to make it happen were so remote that it was unlikely life existed anywhere else. “Too much,” said Thaddeus Roundtree, whose name is one of the few to survive into the modern era, “has to be exactly right. We should consider ourselves fortunate beyond belief that we are here.”

“I never really thought about it that much, Ronda,” Aiko said. “The universe is empty. What else could it be? We’ve been to thousands of worlds that have water and sunlight and they’ve got nothing.”

“I know. Which is why I’d really enjoy meeting someone who came from a different place. You know, someone we could sit down with and talk to. Preferably over a beer.”

“Talk about what?”

“Probably it would be the same things you and I would talk about. How good’s the food? What are the politicians like on your world? Or maybe we’d get a handle on the secret of life.”

“You’re hoping we’ll actually find something, aren’t you, Ronda?”

“Well, sure. I’d love to find something. The problem is, if we do get lucky, we’re not supposed to let them know we’re there. That sort of takes all the fun out of it.”

Six weeks can be a long time cooped up in a Lexco. It’s designed for no more than four passengers, and for flights of relatively short duration, maybe two weeks maximum. We were traveling through hyperspace, of course, so there wasn’t even anything outside to look at. It was just a dark vacuum. Either of us would have given a lot to be able to look out a window and see some light.

Bryan created a few avatars for us, mostly from entertainment types, so we talked with romantic leads and comic actors. But they seemed puzzled when we asked how they’d respond if they met a real alien.

“What’s an alien?” asked Lenny Toliver, a singer Aiko admitted having fallen in love with during her teens.

“I’m not sure Lenny would have been somebody I’d have wanted around constantly,” she said. Her eyes sparkled. “He’d have made a decent one-night stand, I guess. But when he gets offstage he loses something.” She sat back and shook her head. “I hope you get what you want, Ronda. I suspect it would make Harlow pretty happy too.”

The days grew increasingly long. Aiko played virtual games with Bryan, rescuing people lost on strange worlds and investigating haunted houses and whatnot. We worked out each morning after breakfast. We watched shows. And when we sat down to talk, the conversations inevitably went back over the same old issue. What awaited us at the system we were now calling Iskar?

“I’m not sure,” Aiko said midway through the third week, “that we shouldn’t have ducked this assignment.”

It occurred to me that, had I not revealed my enthusiasm for this, she’d have called in sick.

It was a painfully long ride. Aiko remained negative, and there was no way to get away from her. But eventually it ended and we emerged twenty-eight light-years from Iskar. That meant a second jump, of course, but it only required slightly more than an hour. We came out of it 130 million kilometers from the star. “Bryan,” I said, “are we picking up anything that looks like artificial radiation?”

“I’m not reading anything,” he said.

“Okay. Let’s get a look at the planetary system. Concentrate on the Goldilocks Zone.”

“You understand that will require some time.”

“Yes. I had a feeling you wouldn’t be able to do it by lunch.”

“Ronda.” His tone became brittle. “You are being caustic.”

Aiko grinned at me.

“I didn’t mean to offend.” I tried to keep a straight face. Bryan tends to behave as if everybody else on board is an idiot. “Also, if you will, check for artificial radio signals. And send a message back to Harlow. Tell him we’ve arrived.”

“In fact,” he said, “we have a message coming in now from Harlow.” He appeared in the middle of the passenger cabin. Tall, redheaded, good-looking, probably only four centuries old. “Ronda,” he said, “FYI, we received a second transmission seventeen hours after the first one. It was identical to the first. Since then the source has been silent.”

We watched a few shows from the library. I enjoy comedies, while Aiko has a taste for romance. It didn’t really matter. During those hours as we moved into the planetary system, neither of us could get much interested. We spent most of our time staring out at the sky and waiting to hear something from Bryan.

He finally cleared his throat to alert us an announcement was coming. “There’s a planet in the habitable zone,” he said. “It’s a gas giant. But it has about twenty satellites.” He began running images, all small rocky moons. Then he showed us one with oceans. “This is the only one that seems a possible source.” Twenty minutes later he was back: “There’s also a world on the outer edge of the zone, roughly corresponding in size to Marikim. I can’t make out any details, other than that it has a large moon.”

“Which is closer?”

“The gas giant, Ronda.”

The satellite with the oceans also had huge mountain ranges and vast deserts. But there were no cities, no lights on the night side, no sign of life.

The second world, the one on the edge of the habitable zone, also looked dark as we approached. “Waste of time,” said Aiko.

“We’ve come this far. I wouldn’t want to go back and tell Harlow we didn’t take a close look.”

“I think he’d understand.”

“I doubt it.”

“Ronda, he knows this is a futile run. He sent us out because he had no choice. He couldn’t ignore the signal, but he didn’t expect anything would come of it.”

“I didn’t realize you knew him that well.”

“Look, I don’t. But I know how these things work. We do stuff by the book.” She pressed her fingertips against her temples and tried to look as if she were taking me seriously. “The signal could have come from somewhere else farther on than this system. Maybe the signal just happened to be lined up so that it passed through here and eventually reached Marikim. Or maybe it was something bouncing around in the system back home. I don’t know. It’s happened before. But it’s pretty obvious it didn’t come from this place.”

“Let’s stay with it a bit.”

“I can give you another reason for continuing,” said Bryan. “There appears to be something in orbit.”

It was a ship.

The thing was considerably larger than the Brinkmann. A line of symbols was visible near the prow, presumably a designator, but I’d never seen anything that resembled them before. It had an inflated dark gray hull, with eight windows and a set of transmitters and receivers mounted near the forward section. “Look at the thrusters,” said Aiko. “That thing has to be FTL.”

“We’ve got it,” I said.

“I guess so, Ronda. But if it was the source of the transmission, it’s been here seven thousand years.”

“Bryan,” I said, “say hello to them. See if you get a response.” Please answer, I thought. If we get a reply, we’ve got aliens. Otherwise, we have an ancient wreck.

His lamps began blinking, indicating he was transmitting. Aiko looked my way. Her lips were pressed tight and her face had paled. It was the first time I’d seen her show any sign of nervousness. Then, Bryan’s voice: “They’re responding.” He put it on the speaker. A female voice that might have been human was talking, but I’d never heard the language before. After about a minute it stopped.

“Hello,” I leaned over the microphone. “Can you understand me?”

The voice answered, but I still could make nothing of it. “What do we do?” asked Aiko.

“Not sure. It’s a bit late to avoid letting them know we’re here.” I stared out at the ship. The hull was damaged in a few places, probably from collisions with rocks. The vehicle was now about two kilometers away. It had a hatch that looked about the right size to accommodate a human being. And I got the shock of my life when it opened.

But nobody appeared.

“Aiko, put us in a parallel orbit. Bryan, open a link to Harlow.”

“Link is up, Ronda.” I got pressed back in my chair as Aiko adjusted course.

“Harlow, we’ve found a ship. It’s in orbit around a world that appears to be lifeless. We’ll send an image.” I took a deep breath. “A couple of minutes ago they opened a hatch.” I glanced at Aiko. She nodded. “We’re going to go over and take a look. Will get back to you shortly.”

We eased in close. Then Aiko turned it over to Bryan, instructing him to maintain position. I went back to the microphone. “I wish we could speak with you.”

“It’s probably an AI,” said Bryan. “I’m working on it now.”

“Is it one of ours?”

Brian didn’t usually hesitate. But this time he did. “Yes. I believe it is.”

Aiko was wearing an I-told-you-so look.

“Apparently,” said Bryan, “this vehicle has been here at least seven thousand years. Considering the technology from that era, a voyage from any of those inhabited worlds would have taken decades. They had FTL, but it was crude. So who opened the hatch?”

I released my belt and started back to the storage locker for a pressure suit.

“Let me do this.” Aiko got up and started to follow.

“Why?”

“Suppose, after you get on board, it takes off?”

“I doubt it’s gone anywhere in a long time. I don’t think we need to worry.”

Aiko shook her head. “I’ve got this.”

“Let me check first. Make sure there’s no surprise. Then, if you want to come over—”

“Forget it, Ronda.” She pulled out one of the suits and began climbing into it.

“Aiko, I think you’re forgetting who’s in charge.”

Actually, she was. But after some more arguing she agreed I could accompany her. We got changed, pulled on jetpacks, and started for the airlock. “I’m not suggesting there’s any danger,” said Bryan, “but if you do not return, what do you wish me to do?”

“We’ll be in contact,” Aiko said. “And we’ll be back in a few hours. At most.”

“When your air supply runs out.”

“Good, Bryan. You can count.” She went into the airlock and I followed. “Keep the place warm.”

“Be careful,” he said.

We depressurized the airlock and opened the outer hatch. “You ready, Ronda?”

“Right behind you.”

The ship was about fifty meters away. She leaned out into the void, and stopped. “The inner hatch is also open.” In case there’d been any lingering doubt about something being alive in there. She pushed off the deck, drifted across to the other ship, and touched down on the hull. When I arrived a minute later she was already inside. We passed through into a cabin. Two tables were surrounded by about ten chairs. If there’d been any doubt the ship was designed for humans, it was shattered. Everything was of a size appropriate for Aiko and me. The chairs looked as if they had been comfortable, but when I touched one it was rock hard.

A passageway opened out of the rear of the cabin, and I couldn’t help watching it, as if someone might appear at any time. A silly notion, since we were in a vacuum, but I couldn’t help it. We went onto the bridge where we found two seats and a control panel with unfamiliar markings. Aiko took a long moment to inspect the pilot’s seat. “I wonder,” she said, “what would happen if we tried to start the engine?”

We returned to the main cabin and entered the passageway. It was lined with doors, four on each side and one at the rear. Aiko tried to open one, twisted the knob and pushed. She got nothing. I tried to help but we couldn’t move it. “Everything’s frozen,” she said. “Maybe locked as well.” She floated back out into the cabin. “We’ve got a cutter back in the ship. I’m going to get it. You want to come or wait here?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back.” She went out through the airlock.

I opened my channel to Bryan. “How are you doing with the AI? Am I going to be able to talk to her?”

“Yes. Give me a few more minutes.”

I drifted around the interior. This was obviously the source of the transmission. Had to be. But why use the radio? I couldn’t believe they didn’t have Hypercom communication even in those long gone days.

Aiko came back with the cutter. I’m not sure what we expected to find inside the cabins. But I was happy that there were no skeletons. The cabins, all of them, were empty. No towels or shoes or anything else indicating there’d been anyone aboard the last flight other than the AI.

We cut through the door at the end of the passageway, which opened into a workout room that also served as a storage area. We passed through another door and got a surprise.

Ten coffin-sized containers were mounted on low platforms, five on each side of the chamber. Happily, they were empty. “They’re for sleepers,” Aiko said.

“How do you mean?”

“Back in the old days, if you were going on a long trip, they induced a cold sleep. You blacked out for a few years and you got revived when the ship arrived at its destination.”

I recalled having read something about that. “I don’t think I’d be much interested in that kind of travel.”

Finally we got through to the engine room.

“Holy cats,” said Aiko, “look at this.” There’d been a fire. Most of the equipment appeared to have been scorched. I didn’t know anything about drive units and onboard communication systems, but it was obvious that ship couldn’t have gone anywhere.

Bryan broke in: “Ronda, I think Chayla is ready to talk to you.”

“That’s her name? Chayla?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. Hello, Chayla. Are you there?”

“Yes, I am here.” She sounded happy. Relieved.

“I’m Ronda. What happened?” We were still looking at the fried equipment.

“You mean to the ship?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. The engine exploded. I have no idea why.”

“Where are you from?”

“Sorkon.”

I’d heard of it. It was probably one of the worlds occupied during the initial expansion. I checked my pad. It still existed, though it looked like a backwater. “What are you doing out here?”

“I was part of the Pegasus Project.” She said it as if we should have recognized the term.

“And what was that?”

“Why, the hunt for extraterrestrials. It was a long-range effort, launched after thousands of years of searching had revealed nothing. After almost everybody had given up on it. The common wisdom was that humans were alone.”

“And they sent you out to look?”

“Yes. I was one of thirty-seven vehicles that went to extremely distant places.”

“Were they all automated missions?”

“Yes.”

“And you got stuck here when your engine blew up.”

“That is correct, Ronda.”

“We picked up a radio transmission that probably came from you. Why radio? Didn’t you have a faster means of communicating?”

“I did before the explosion happened.”

“Oh.” Aiko sighed. How could she not have figured that out?

“Well, Chayla, if you like we can take you home with us.”

“Oh, yes. Please. I do not want to spend any more time here.”

“We’re glad to have the opportunity to help. And if it’s any consolation, we never have found any aliens. It looks as if we really are alone.”

Chayla fell silent.

“What’s wrong?” asked Aiko.

“You never found them?”

“Found who?” I asked.

“All this time,” she said. “And you never knew. Incredible.”

I looked over at Aiko and shook my head. “What are you trying to say, Chayla?”

“When the engine blew out, it threw me into a declining orbit around the sun. I sent out a radio call for help. It was all I had, and I couldn’t even aim the transmission. I’d lost all control. I thought it was the end, because none of the other Pegasus vehicles were close enough to get to me in time. I couldn’t even aim a message back at Sorkon. Not that it would have mattered since they were hundreds of light-years away.”

“So what happened?” Both of us asked the question.

“Someone came. They arrived several weeks after I’d been signaling frantically for help. And they pulled me clear.”

Aiko and I were staring at each other. “So who were they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They came on board and we spent time learning to communicate, but I could not pronounce many of the sounds they made.”

“They were not human?”

“No.”

“What did they look like?”

“They wore space suits, much like the ones you have now. Their faces, what I could see of them, were green, and looked vaguely amphibian. They had six fingers.”

“Were you able to record any of this?”

“Yes. But it was lost thousands of years ago. The electronics don’t survive long unless there’s a method to reinvigorate them. Which I did not have except for the central system that supports me.”

“And they just went away and left you here?”

“They offered to take me home, to their home, but my programming would not have permitted it. I told them I’d sent for assistance and that it would arrive shortly. At my request, they placed me in orbit around Talius, where I knew I’d be easier to find. If anyone did come. I continued sending messages until the transmitter finally gave out. Unfortunately I couldn’t aim them. They were simply directional beams fired off into the sky.”

“Fortunately,” said Aiko, “one of them arrived at our home world.”

“That is fortunate.”

“This world,” I said, “is Talius?”

“I’ve lived here too long not to have given it a name.”

“What does it mean?”

“In my language, Home.”

We disconnected Chayla and crossed over to the Brinkmann with her. “We’re taking back some pretty big news,” I said.

“That there are aliens? I guess so.”

“That too. But the big news will be that they’re apparently a lot like us.”

“You mean because they stopped and tried to help?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Maybe they’re even more like us than you think, Ronda.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it doesn’t look as if they ever came back to check on Chayla.”