Writing for Fun
August 2015
Visitors From Space - Pete Norman
'The Universe looks like a vast empty space with just a few stars scattered about, light years apart. But it is not quiet; it is filled with a random, grainy, background mush. It sounds a bit like a handful of sharp sand dribbling into a tin can.
'In the days before 24hr television, BBC broadcasts ended late in the evening; the National Anthem was the last thing that was played before the channel closed. If you happened to leave the TV set turned on, then this is the noise you would have heard from your set.'
Barbara pushed the button on her computer and the hall was flooded with the sound of white noise. In an instant the murmuring of voices threatened to overwhelm the sound, but she was not in the least concerned, as there had been immediate recognition from her audience. She ran her eye over the room which was almost filled to capacity, the average age somewhere up in the high seventies; it was obviously a very familiar sound to this generation.
She waited for the buzz to subside.
'Maybe you can also remember the 1982 horror film, Poltergeist, in which a small girl – Carol-Anne Freeling – sits in front of her TV set, hearing ghostly voices amongst the background mush. What she was listening to was in reality not the sounds of evil spirits, but the sound of the universe captured by the TV aerial: Cosmic Noise. It originates in the stars, from the centres of galaxies, from the debris falling into Black Holes, from meteorites falling to Earth and burning up in the Earth's atmosphere . . .'
Once again she paused, searching the audience to make sure they were still with her. Several conversations were still continuing, with a couple of irritated shushes making futile attempts to stop them, but by and large the remainder were still looking her way . . . all, that is, except the little old lady in the third row, whose head was bowed, her white hair bobbing gently. Barbara hoped that she was asleep rather than requiring urgent medical attention, but her neighbours did not seem at all bothered by her situation – on the contrary, they appeared to be quite accustomed to it.
'I work for the UK S.E.T.I. Research Network – that is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Imagine us as modern day Carol-Annes, not sitting in front of a television set, but instead behind a vast array of hideously expensive machinery. However, the sound we are listening to is just the same. What we are listening for is something uniquely ordered amongst the random disorder of the Cosmic Noise.
'I am sure you will all be thinking that all of this must be just about as exciting as watching paint dry, and some days – most days in fact – I would tend to agree with you. However, I was first inspired to do this job by the great Irish Astrophysicist Susan Jocelyn Bell. As a postgraduate student in 1967 she was working on a radio telescope, designed to study Quasars, when she detected a bit of 'scruff' on her chart-recorder papers. It was a signal pulsing every second, which stood out from the random mush surrounding it like a beacon and with great excitement she dubbed it the 'Little Green Man', believing it to be a signal sent by intelligent life.
'After years of painstaking research she finally identified it as a Pulsar. She may not have discovered extra-terrestrial life, but at that time it was hailed as the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century. And that discovery, ladies and gentlemen, she said was worth every single moment of watching paint dry.'
As Barbara paused she glanced again at the little old lady in the third row and was relieved to see her jerk her head back with a loud snort, attracting a look of intense annoyance from her neighbour – no urgent medical treatment was required just yet, thank the Lord.
'Well, that's the boring bit out of the way, what I want to share with you now could well fizzle out like a damp squib or else it might turn out to be the most exciting thing to happen in Science since Pythagoras discovered that the world was round.
'Our Radio Telescopes can focus on a very small window into the universe and we have the most sensitive equipment to analyse the signals we receive. Computers filter out and isolate the different wavelengths and search for anomalies in far more depth than a human being could ever hope to achieve.
'For decades we have laboured on with little success – we have had a few heart-stopping incidents, that's true, but nothing so far that has managed to survive more intense scrutiny. But then we heard a strange sound amongst the white noise. Not the, 'lub-dub' heartbeat of a Pulsar, but more like, 'lub-dub- - -dub'. It has been transmitted in exactly the same frequency and in exactly the same rhythm for a little over three months now and only ever from one singular point in space. We know its precise coordinates, which we have passed on to our colleagues in other study areas: Optical, Infrared, Ultraviolet, X-Ray, High Energy Stereoscopic, but none of their searches have brought us any closer to determining what is producing the signal, where it is, or how far away it is from us.
'Lub-dub- - -dub.' It is the most intriguing and haunting sound, but it has a significance which is best known to itself, because the best scientific brains we can muster have absolutely no idea what it is or who, or what, is producing it. Could it really be Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? We don't know . . . yet . . . but we are throwing everything we have got at trying to find out.'
Barbara talked on for a while about her work in general and then, when she eventually brought things to a close, the Chair thanked her for her most interesting talk. She answered a couple of pertinent, probing questions and then a few more naïve ones. Behind her the sound of a small hatchway being opened signalled the end of her session. As one the entire elderly audience erupted from their seats, all converging on the far more interesting singularity that was the tea servery.
She drove back thinking that it had not gone too badly; it was the first time she had ever given a talk to a U.3.A., but she had a suspicion that when word got around, it might not be her last.
When she got back to the Observatory, James was exactly where she had left him, hunched over an array of computer monitors, each filled with a mess of incomprehensible data, his fingers a pink blur against the stark black of the keyboard. The only noticeable change was that the waste basket was now close to overflowing with Coke Zero cans and the workstation around him was so deep in doughnut crumbs that it resembled Bondi Beach, but without the Australian sun.
'How are we doing?' she asked, slipping into the chair beside him.
'Ok . . . ish.' His eyes never left the screen and his fingers never once slowed in their wild keyboard dance. 'You've got more gain, improved isolation and in a while you'll have more visual.' He glanced up towards her for a brief moment, a pained expression on his face. 'What idiot set up these algorithms for you in the first place?'
Roger appeared behind her. 'Allow me to translate. He is saying that you should have signal volume increased by a factor of about a hundred, which will allow greater separation of the frequencies and James is working on a graphical display of the data which should make it easier to work with.'
Barbara smiled. She was certainly impressed, but was most reluctant to disturb the genius at work any longer than she had to, besides, his mental brick wall had dropped back down around him again – it was almost as if she was no longer there.
Over a cup of coffee she regaled Roger with the details of her U3A talk and with her quasi 'near death' experience.
Roger laughed. 'Sounds like you've got more chance of finding life in space than in that little old lady!'
'Well, thankfully no. You should have seen her go when the hatchway opened; she was quick enough off the mark for her tea and biscuit!'
When they got back the monitors were lit up like Christmas trees, data pouring down the screen in an avalanche of seemingly random figures. James pushed his chair back, eased his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. His grin was a challenge for them to not find what he was about to reveal the most exciting thing ever. He clicked an icon on the screen and the display changed in a heartbeat to a simple graph which spread seamlessly across four wide screen monitors. At first it was difficult to see exactly what it was plotting, but then realisation struck her like a sledgehammer. Barbara let out a soft hiss.
'Oh my God!' She put her hand to her mouth to stifle any further exclamation, but her eyes could hardly conceal their excitement. 'This is a chart of . . . the volume of the signals?'
James nodded, looking pleased, that was precisely the reaction he had hoped for.
The display showed that the signal up until 20.52hrs on the 12th of July was a perfectly flat horizontal line, each signal precise and identical in volume . . . but from that point onwards the trace took a definite surge diagonally upwards.
Barbara turned to Roger. 'The signal strength is increasing. Why?'
Roger shook his head. 'I think the word you are looking for is not 'why?' but 'when? There are only two reasons for an increase in signal volume, either whatever is causing it is growing stronger . . .
Barbara completed the mindboggling sentence, 'Or else whatever it is it's getting closer.'
She ran her eye along the date axis to the point where the trace changed. 'Look at the date. When did we start transmitting a response to the signal?'
James looked up, puzzled.
Roger explained, 'The Director decided that if this really was ET, then we should acknowledge him by sending back an identical signal to the originating coordinates; in other words, to set up a two way communication.' He moved over to his own console and opened up the operation log file. 'Bloody hell! How does 20.48hrs on the 12th grab you?'
Barbara nibbled nervously at the tip of her fingernail. 'Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so the object is either four light minutes away or else it took them four minutes to respond and it is now an awful lot closer.'
James ran his fingers over the keyboard. 'Four light minutes is just under 45 million miles, which is well inside our Solar System, but if you allow for some thinking time . . . then it could be just above our heads right now.'
He looked back at the graph; the volume was going up steadily and he had to make adjustments to bring the trace back onto the screen again.
Roger said, 'So what we do is . . . we change the signal we are sending out and see what happens.' It took him a few minutes to set up the change from 'lub-dub- - -dub' to 'lub-dub- - -lub-dub' and then he hit the SEND button. The three stood in silent apprehension as the seconds ticked by, but the change of the incoming signal to match was almost instantaneous.
Barbara rushed to the observatory door and out into the dark. Above her was a bright pinpoint of light, growing brighter by the second.