How important are firsts?
First heavier-than-air flight; first man in space; first step on the moon; first hyperspace journey; first on Mars, Haven etc. Surely all of them fade into insignificance when compared with the first communication with an alien species.
My entity jabbed at one of my nerves in jest and asked me if I no longer considered him alien.
Eight minutes before the radio broadcast reappeared over the horizon, Tosh detected another broadcast, on a different frequency, obviously coming from some other location on the planet which we had not yet been able to find.
It wasn’t sophisticated. It didn’t need to be. All it had to be was intelligible and it was – a simple progression of numbers using exactly the same pulse system we had been using to send to them.
Tosh immediately stopped transmitting on the old frequency and began again on the new one.
‘Bingo!’ he said. Whoever was living on Gelid was replying to our first tentative broadcast.
‘Wow!’ said Bill. ‘Amazing.’
‘Okay, Tosh,’ I said. ‘Put your plan into practice.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Here we go. This transmission is to provide an image. NASA has provided a 3D image of Vitruvian man and woman into greyscale dots within a five hundred by five hundred frame. Blank dots are extremely short and parts of the drawing are longer. At the end of each line of five hundred, I’m transmitting an extra-long dot followed by a similarly lengthened silent gap. Then the second line goes. After the final line, there is a final dot or pulse lasting five seconds. The sequence then repeats.’
‘How long does the entire picture take to transmit?’ asked Mary.
‘I’ve automated it, so about a minute. I’ll be able to send it more than thirty times before they disappear over the horizon,’ Tosh replied.
‘What’s their transmission doing right now?’ asked Anna.
‘That same sequence is being repeated over and over. No primes or Fibonacci sequence.’
‘Why might that be?’ I asked.
‘How am I meant to know,’ he snapped, then realised he needed to show more control. ‘Sorry. We have no idea if they understood the other two sequences, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t. Perhaps they think it would be unnecessary. The fact they are sending any reply is enough to prove they got ours.’
‘What do you think is going on down there?’ asked Mary.
‘Well,’ said Tosh, ‘if it was me receiving this image, I’d be trying to find something I could send back to show what we look like. Don’t expect that for at least another orbit.’
‘Got it!’ shouted Bill, pointing west. ‘A much bigger complex of rectangular structures set into the slope on the eastern side of the mountains facing the lake. Probably why we missed it. They’re not visible unless you’re looking west.’
Most of us grabbed our binoculars as Bill centred the Celestron on the complex.
‘At least six structures. Each one seems to be separate, but joined to the others,’ said Anna.
‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘Wonder why it is not just a much larger structure. Seems an inefficient design.’
‘There’s a tank to the left of them. Two in fact,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Anna. ‘Must be either heating fuel or air, I’d imagine.’
‘Seems likely,’ said Tosh.
Mary said, ‘I’ve had another look at the first location and there is a tank there as well, it seems to be partly buried so we didn’t notice it.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said zeroing my binoculars on the structure. ‘They seem to be living underground. Wouldn’t have thought it was a very pleasant existence.’
‘I suppose there could be a vast complex,’ said Bill.
‘We need to know if they are the Quietusians or a wholly different species,’ I said.
‘Hopefully next orbit,’ said Tosh.
Anna, can you lift us into a geosynchronous orbit over that large structure by its next orbit?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Contact can be continuous then. I’ll begin the manoeuvre,’ she said and busied herself at her console.
I wondered where all of this was leading. How long would it take to develop a workable language between us and them?
In the end analysis, we couldn’t lose sight of the fact that we were still lost in the spolding conundrum.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
As the larger structure came into view, we were still stabilising the new orbit.
‘What are they sending now?’ I asked.
‘No change. Just the numbers,’ said Tosh. ‘Wait… now it’s changing. Blocks of five hundred. We could be getting an image.’
All but Anna peered at Tosh’s console as the picture built up on his screen.
‘Oh, that’s clever,’ he said.
Three images showed us a front view, side view and back view.
‘I’d forgotten they had six limbs,’ I said as the front view clearly showed the main pair of arms and the smaller pair slightly below.
‘Oh, damn!’ said Mary. ‘You don’t think they’ll assume we have two torsos and four arms and legs from the Da Vinci type portrayal, do you?’
‘No. They’re obviously two people, or NASA wouldn’t have used them,’ said Tosh.
‘You’d better send them some real images. Those skulls and rib structures are pretty frightening if they could be seen through our skins,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, I’ll send some real pictures too. Don’t panic,’ said Tosh.
‘Just don’t want any misunderstandings,’ said Mary.
‘Like turning left or right during spolding?’ said Tosh.
‘That’s not called for, Tosh,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered to Mary, who punched him, not too severely in the upper arm.
‘At least we know it is the Quietusians,’ said Bill.
‘We’re now in a geosynchronous orbit directly over the main complex,’ announced Anna, floating over to examine the images.
‘There’s more arriving,’ said Tosh.
‘It’s the Trappist-1 system,’ said Anna, as a series of concentric circles developed showing all seven planets.
‘And look,’ said Mary. ‘They’ve put an arrow on Gelid and a heavy cross through Quietus and Haven. They’re warning us!’
‘Yes,’ said Tosh, sadly. I guessed he was thinking that if we’d visited Gelid first, Chi would never have died on Haven.
‘I’m now transmitting the other images the NASA language team put together,’ said Tosh.
‘Let’s see them,’ I said. We’d all seen them during training, but they had faded into distant memory with all that had happened.
‘I’ll put them on the main monitor,’ said Tosh and a series of images appeared on the screen.
First a human head with the words “one head” both in print and sound followed by two heads, one hand, two hands, one finger, two fingers, three fingers, four fingers, one thumb, one arm, two arms and so on. At one point the screen became peppered with numbers, explaining the decimal system and introducing larger integers.
‘They’ll need time to absorb these,’ said Tosh.
‘How many are there?’ asked Bill.
‘Around five thousand. When they’re finished, I’ll copy and paste items from their image and use the words human for us and a blinking arrow for them.’
We were all surprised when we heard ‘one head’ come from the radio speaker coinciding with the arrival of an image of a Quietusian head. They’d got it. Now it was just a matter of time. We truly were talking to an alien race, but the biggest problem would come in explaining concept words and sentence construction.
The trouble for all of us, as a crew, was that we were desperately anxious to complete the remaining spolding journeys to get back to our original Earth and that was clashing with our excitement over the alien communication. We had to stay, but we needed to leave. Somehow, I must square the circle.