The Lure

24 Pandora’s Box

The cabin was hot and already the Prime Minister could feel light beads of perspiration on his forehead.

The source of the heat was a glass-fronted stove, with logs glowing bright red and blue-white flames disappearing up a black flue. Logs were piled neatly on either side of it. On a mantelpiece above were beer glasses, books with German titles and a copper hod with long matches. The room was small; floors, walls and ceiling were pine-clad. A sideboard held an eclectic assortment of pottery and photographs. On the wall with the door, resting on hooks, were a long hunting rifle, two fishing rods, snowshoes, a row of heavy fur coats and Pembroke’s hat. The smell of pasta and Mediterranean herbs drifted through from a half-open door and reminded Edgeworth that he hadn’t eaten for twelve hours.

Ogorodnikov and Edgeworth were scarcely three feet apart, facing each other across a rough wooden table. Ogorodnikov’s translator, immediately to the President’s left, was a thin, near-bald man with a goatee beard, spectacles and a dark suit and tie. To Edgeworth, he bore a startling resemblance to a young Lenin. The far ends of the table were occupied by Velikhov and Pembroke.

The Academician’s presence gave the PM an uneasy feeling that he had been manipulated. Now scientific input would be delivered by a man whose country’s interests were not necessarily those of his own. And Pembroke would be as useful as a chocolate teapot. To judge by his slightly dismayed expression, Pembroke seemed to think so too.

Edgeworth glanced at Uncle Ogorodnikov, wondered if he had indeed engineered the situation. Ogorodnikov caught the look, but the man’s face was impervious to scrutiny. He opened the exchange, looking directly into Edgeworth’s eyes. The high-flier from the FO was sitting on Edgeworth’s right — the PM’s good ear. He translated Ogorodnikov’s words: ‘What are we to make of this, Prime Minister? Are we witnessing the end of mankind’s childhood?’

Edgeworth replied warily. ‘This discovery does change the way we think about ourselves, President Ogorodnikov.’ Lenin turned his head toward his boss and spoke rapidly and quietly into his ear.

Ogorodnikov acknowledged the cautious response with a slight smile. ‘I would like you to call me Mikhail.’

Edgeworth returned the half-smile but didn’t reciprocate the offer of familiarity. ‘In the short term this will be a major shock, Mikhail. Learning that out there is at least one intelligence probably millions of years in advance of ours.’

The Prime Minister sensed, rather than saw, his translator at his side freezing up, and remembered that the FO man had been given no inkling of the purpose of the meeeting. The man recovered quickly and delivered Ogorodnikov’s reply, struggling to keep the astonishment out of his voice: ‘An intelligence which wishes to communicate with us, and which is prepared to give us knowledge thousands of years ahead of our time.’

Edgeworth turned to the man seated at the far end of the table. There would be no keeping him out of it. ‘What can Professor Velikhov tell us about this matter?’

Georgi Velikhov cleared his throat. There was a brief, three-way exchange in Russian between Ogorodnikov, his translator and the Academician. Then Velikhov was speaking in good English with a hint of Harvard American. ‘Gentlemen, the idea of searching for alien life is centuries old. In 1822 the mathematician Gauss thought there were people on the Moon, and they could be contacted using a system of mirrors. Others thought to signal Martians or lunar dwellers by digging geometric ditches in the Sahara, filling them with oil and setting them on fire.’

‘Can we skip a century or two?’ Edgeworth asked impatiently.

Velikhov continued: ‘The radio astronomers have been looking for extraterrestrial signals for almost fifty years. The pioneering work was carried out by an American called Frank Drake. He used a small radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Now, all the world’s radio telescopes routinely look for meaningful chirps — signals in amongst the hiss of the galaxies and the echo of the Big Bang. Today’s equipment is ten trillion times more sensitive than Drake’s Project Ozma. And the Americans are using the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo in Puerto Rico, to examine a thousand nearby star systems. But all this effort has produced nothing. We have heard only a great silence.’

‘The people inside the mountain weren’t using radio,’ Edgeworth pointed out.

Velikhov nodded. ‘Perhaps we have been foolish. Perhaps we should have realised that the aliens might have discovered more advanced methods of communication than anything we could imagine. All this time we have been looking for smoke signals.’

The FO man translated Ogorodnikov’s words. ‘Are people prepared for this news? Will there be panic in the streets?’

‘No. People see Captain Kirk fighting aliens on TV every day. And I suppose you know as well as I do, Mikhail, that there are ways of putting a message over to the public.’

‘Aha! Your famous spin doctors! I too have my “propagandisty”. But the matter goes much deeper than spin, Prime Minister. Look what happened to the American Indians when Europe invaded North America. Look what happened to the Mayan civilisation when the Spaniards arrived. Whenever a strong culture comes into contact with a weak one, the weak is exterminated.’

‘But we’re talking about the transmission of information, surely not the prospect of physical invasion.’

Velikhov cleared his throat again. ‘The distances involved in interstellar travel are huge. The technical problems even for an advanced civilisation…’

‘How can you put limits on the capabilities of an advanced civilisation?’ Ogorodnikov wanted to know.

Velikhov continued to speak English, while Lenin muttered into Ogorodnikov’s ear: ‘I don’t, Nature does. Nature has set up a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than light. No civilisation, however advanced, can break that limit. Mother Nature has also arranged for the Galaxy to be immense. Given these factors, colonisation by aliens would take an immense span of time. Our species could be extinct by the time they arrived in their starships. But the real question is, why would they want to conquer us? Do we want to conquer an ant heap? We have nothing to offer and are of no conceivable importance to them.’

‘This confirms my opinion,’ Edgeworth said. ‘There will be no panic. Intense interest, yes, but no blood in the streets. The Mayan and Native American civilisations were wiped out by physical contact. Disease and genocide did for them. What we have here is something different, a transmission of knowledge. Could that destroy our civilisation — mere knowledge?’

Ogorodnikov said, ‘It came close, Prime Minister, in the age of the Bomb.’

Edgeworth showed a polite scepticism. ‘Suppose that, in the time of Moses, there was a single telephone line, and that it connected him to our century. What would that have done to the pastoral societies of the day? Most of the knowledge would be so incomprehensible to them that they couldn’t have used it.’

Ogorodnikov was studying Edgeworth closely. The FO man translated his words. ‘So, what are you saying? That you agree with my Academician, here? That these aliens pose no threat?’

Edgeworth leaned forward across the table. ‘The threat of new knowledge doesn’t worry me. The threat of invasion doesn’t worry me.’

‘What then?’

‘It’s the threat of extermination.’

The room fell silent.

Edgeworth said, ‘Mikhail, if we’re of no importance to them, why are they signalling us?’

Ogorodnikov nodded grimly. ‘Precisely. You and I have been thinking the same thoughts. The signal may be a lure. If we reply, they have a measure of our state of scientific literacy.’

‘And are we still thinking the same thought, Mikhail? That if we reply, the next message from them might be our obliteration?’

Ogorodnikov clasped his hands together on the table. He nodded.

Velikhov interrupted in English. ‘That is nonsense. I am sorry but I must protest. We are ants. We pose no conceivable threat to them. An advanced civilisation will long have climbed out of the mire of barbarism and warfare.’

Ogorodnikov spoke sharply. The FO man translated verbatim: ‘You are here as a scientific adviser, not a policymaker.’

Velikhov ignored the rebuke. His voice was animated. ‘Advanced societies will be altruistic. They are simply trying to contact young technological societies such as our own. They judge that we have reached a stage where we can be helped. Look at the information they have sent us already.’

Edgeworth said, ‘We may be no threat now. When better to stop us, before we become one?’

There was an edge to Ogorodnikov’s smile. ‘A lure. A delicious bait. Perhaps the extermination requires no death rays on their part.’ He turned to Edgeworth. ‘The English have an author, Mary Shelley.’

‘Had. She’s a nineteenth-century figure.’

‘She created the Frankenstein monster.’

‘Yes.’ Ogorodnikov’s translator imitated the caution in Edgeworth’s voice.

‘We are being invited, are we not, to turn ourselves into monsters, for an unknown purpose, with a molecular code supplied to us by creatures about which we know nothing. What is this, Prime Minister, but a modern Frankenstein story?’

Velikhov interrupted his boss. ‘Forgive me, President, but as your scientific adviser I must protest against such nonsense. Improving our minds and bodies doesn’t turn us into monsters, it lifts us out of barbarism.’

‘You miss my point, Professor. What time bombs may be hidden in these codes? What sort of monster will they yield?’

Edgeworth said, ‘These are weighty issues, President Ogorodnikov. They’re matters for extensive discussions by the whole international community, perhaps extending over many years. It needs input from philosophers, scientists, even religious leaders. How can you and I decide these things in a few hours in a log cabin?’

Ogorodnikov’s brow wrinkled. ‘If the genie is to be kept in the bottle — and I said if — then we dare not access the wisdom of our philosophers. Someone would talk.’

‘Are you seriously suggesting that you and I reach an instant decision on a matter which needs to be thrashed out by—’

Ogorodnikov interrupted the translator forcefully, spreading his arms wide as he spoke. ‘Prime Minister, don’t you see? That is the tragedy of our situation. We have no choice. The scientists in the mountain will soon be dispersing and when they do, they will open Pandora’s box.’

Edgeworth dabbed at the sweat on his brow. He wondered if some subtle psychology was at play; at any rate Ogorodnikov seemed unperturbed by the heat. The PM looked over at Velikhov. ‘Suppose the home planet of the signallers was public knowledge. And suppose someone wanted to send a reply. Could it be done?’

‘If the extraterrestrials have receivers no better than ours, a ten-kilowatt signal from us could reach anything out to a hundred light years from here. There must be hundreds of radar stations capable of firing off a reply. Yes, it could be done. It’s not even difficult.’

‘You see?’ Ogorodnikov glared at Edgeworth. ‘Once the knowledge is out, the situation is beyond our control. Someone in Cuba or South Africa or Baffin Island could decide to reply. There would be a race for the honour of being the first human to make contact with extraterrestrials.’

Velikhov said, ‘In 1974 the Americans used the Arecibo telescope to send a message to a star cluster with over a hundred thousand members. If one of the stars happens to have a planet, and if someone on that planet happens to be pointing a powerful receiver at us for a few critical minutes in the future, they will know that we are here.’

Ogorodnikov spoke angrily. ‘What right did these Americans have to do that on behalf of all mankind, without first consulting mankind about the possible consequences?’

‘Mikhail Isayevich, the globular cluster is about twenty-five thousand light years away and it will be fifty thousand years before we receive a reply, if we do. They have handed the problem not to us but to our distant descendants.’

‘And are these new signallers fifty thousand years away? Fifty years? Or five?’

Velikhov said, ‘As of Wednesday the scientists in the castle did not know the location of the home planet. But you can be sure they are moving mountains to find out.’

‘And what then?’ Edgeworth asked.

‘I believe that as soon as they know, they will shout their discovery from the rooftops. The news will be round the globe by e-mail in minutes. The public will see it on CNN within an hour. Every telescope in existence will point at whatever star system this signal comes from.’

Edgeworth said, ‘You are telling us, Professor Velikhov, that the scientists in the castle will not willingly be muzzled.’

‘Prime Minister, I guarantee it.’

Edgeworth said, ‘And so, as you say, Mikhail, opening Pandora’s box.’

The two leaders looked into each other’s eyes across the table. Ogorodnikov voiced their thoughts quietly. ‘This presents us with an interesting problem.’

‘You mean…’

The Russian President said, ‘What are we going to do about them?’

Edgeworth broke the shocked silence. He turned to his PPS. ‘Joe, I’d like you to leave us for a few minutes.’

Pembroke, looking stunned, collected his hat without a word. There was a gust of icy air as he left. Edgeworth noted that the darkness outside had been replaced by a dull grey light; through the open door he had seen every detail of the trees and the lake.

Ogorodnikov, at last acknowledging the heat in the cabin, pulled off his heavy sweater. ‘Prime Minister, I have a confession to make. Two days ago I asked our Slovakian friends to place a ring of steel around the castle where these scientists are working. They are not yet aware of this. I realise that I have illegally encroached on the rights of two British citizens.’

Edgeworth acknowledged the confession with a nod.

Ogorodnikov added, ‘And I have a team of specialists standing by. They can fly there, without fear of detection, at a moment’s notice.’

‘Specialists?’

‘Should we decide to suppress the secret permanently.’

Edgeworth sighed. ‘They’re not necessary. I’ve had a man inside the castle since yesterday. He will carry out any special tasks we decide on.’

‘Whatever we decide, Prime Minister, we must at all costs keep the Americans out of this. That will not be easy.’

Edgeworth took a deep breath. ‘Meantime, you and I have to make some hard decisions.’