Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Cover Art by Ralph McQuarrie
    e-book ver.1.0
     
    Prologue One
     
    MESSAGE
     
    One entire hemisphere of the little moon had been turned into an ear. The great radio bowls spread to the sharp curve of the horizon like the lacy skeletons of sea creatures left behind by some unimaginable tide, their serried ranks bristling against the airless black of the sky.
    It was still some hours before worldrise. The stars were huge and brilliant across the empty night. The listening was still good. The immense shells yearned toward the void, collecting the random crackle of radio noise from beyond, as they had done now for half a thousand years.
    Without result.
    In the observatory dome rising at the center of the tremendous array, the project director refocused two or three of the eyes he had been keeping on the control panel and indulged himself for a moment with a full-circle view of the surrounding system. He never tired of the sight, though he had been here from the beginning, watching the field of antennae grow outward for nearly half his lifetime.
    One of the bowls in the middle distance was being serviced, he noticed. He could see the tiny outstretched shapes of space-suited technicians crawling over the vast curved surface like so many animated snowflakes. That one bowl was out of order didn’t matter. A few inactive bowls out of all those thousands could not affect the total picture.
    He touched limbs with his visitor from the Father World and said soundlessly, “It will be in a moment now.”
    The visitor wore a radio sleeve and was doubtless in communication with whatever touch group he represented on the home planet. There was the familiar delay of a couple of seconds while the transmission was relayed to the other side of the moon and bounced down to the planetary surface and back, and then, through the limb he had linked with the visitor, the project director felt the faint ghostly feedback from all those absent voices.
    The visitor was too courteous to express the skepticism of his touch brothers overtly, but he couldn’t entirely suppress his own involuntary reaction to it.
    “You’ve listened to thousands of stars,” he said aloud, “and found nothing?”
    “Tens of thousands, actually,” the project director said good-naturedly. “One at a time, within our own galaxy. But now we’re about to listen to two hundred billion stars at once.”
    “How can you do that?” The visitor let an eye or two wander to the endless thicket of antennae outside. “Even with this marvelous facility. How can you possibly sort them out?”
    “We don’t have to sort them out. The galaxy that we have chosen as our target is so far away that we may consider it as a single radio source. In effect, we will accomplish two million years of listening in an hour. All we have to do is to search the preferred wavelengths until we find one in which a modulated signal outshines the background noise by a significant factor.”
    “And then?”
    “And then we shall know that life is possible elsewhere. That we need not be alone in the universe.”
    At the prompting of his radio sleeve, the visitor said apologetically, “But what’s the good of it? You can’t answer such a signal.”
    “True,” the project director conceded. “Any message we received would necessarily have been sent tens of millions of years ago—not the mere tens of thousands of years for signals from our own galaxy’s farther stars. Any conceivable reply we might make would take additional tens of millions of years to bridge the gulf. By that time they—and we—likely would be long extinct.”
    “Then why bother?” the visitor persisted.
    The project director had answered such questions many times over his centuries of stewardship. Demands on the time of the great radio telescope grew ever more insistent as the race expanded into space. There was competition from other astronomers, other project directors, each with a convincing claim to priority, and soon, with the interstellar probes about to be sent to the nearer stars, the magnificent instrument would be pressed into service as a communication device. The director had fought jealously to protect the fraction of time devoted to the search for intelligent life. One day, he knew, he would have to face a convocation of his fellows and defend the whole monumental enterprise all over again.
    For now, he said simply, “We would have much to learn from the very existence of such a message. And more,