There he had been wrong. Professor de Silva was a devotee of the practice of giving spot quizzes almost every week. That would have been tolerable enough, perhaps, but Ranjit quickly also learned that the professor was the kind who required his classes to memorize dates.
For a while Ranjit tried to take an interest in the subject. Plato was not a total waste of time, he thought, nor Aristotle. But when Professor de Silva began getting up to the Middle Ages, with Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas and all those people, things got worse. Ranjit did not really care about the difference between epistemology and metaphysics, or whether God existed, or what “reality” really was, exactly. So his flicker of interest flickered a bit more and then went out.
But, wonderfully, the joy of exploring Sol’s other worlds kept getting better and better. Especially when, in the second session, Dr. Vorhulst got into the possibilities of actually visiting some of the planets, at least perhaps one or two of the least forbidding ones.
Vorhulst ran through the list for them. Mercury, no; you would hardly want to go there because it was far too hot and dry, even though there did appear to be some water—actually, ice—at one pole. Venus looked to be even worse, wrapped in that carbon dioxide blanket that trapped heat. “The same kind of blanket,” Vorhulst told the class, “that is causing the global warming right here on Earth that I hope we may actually, one day, escape. Or at least the worst parts of it.” On Venus, he added, those “worst parts” had added up to a surface temperature that would melt lead.
Next out was the Earth, “which we don’t actually need to colonize anymore,” Vorhulst joked, “because apparently someone, or something, did already, a good long time ago.” He didn’t give them a chance to react to that but went right on: “So let’s look at Mars. Do we want to visit Mars? More interesting, is there life there? That argument went back and forth for years.” The American astronomer Percival Lowell, he said, had thought not only that there was life on Mars but that it was a highly civilized, massively technological kind of life, capable of building the enormous network of canals Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed on its surface. Better telescopes—with the help of the late Captain Percy Molesworth of Trincomalee—ruined that idea when it was established that Schiaparelli’s “canali” were only random markings that his eye had tricked him into linking into straight lines. Then the first three Mariner missions ended that debate by sending back pictures of a surface that was arid, cratered, and cold. “But,” Dr. Vorhulst finished, “better photographs of the surface of Mars since then have shown indications of actual flowing water. Not flowing anymore now, of course, but pretty definitely real water that did flow sometime in the past. So the life-on-Mars people were riding high again. But,” he added, “then the pendulum swung back. So which way is right?” Dr. Vorhulst swept the audience with his glance, then grinned. “I think the only way we’ll know is to send some people there, preferably with a lot of digging equipment.”
He paused. Then he said, “I guess your next question is, ‘What would they be digging for?’ But before I answer that, do any of you know of a place in the solar system that we have left out so far?”
Silence for a moment while a hundred students counted on their fingers—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—until a young woman in the front row called, “Are you talking about the moon, Dr. Vorhulst?”
He glanced at his finder plate for her name, then tipped her a salute. “Right on, Roshini. But before we get to the moon let me show you some pictures of a place I’ve actually been to, namely, Hawaii.”
He turned to the wall screen behind him, which had begun to display a nighttime shot of a dark hillside running down to the sea. The slope was dotted with splotches of red fires, like the campsite of an army, and where the splotches reached the shoreline there were violent pyrotechnics with fiery meteors flying above the surface.
“That’s Hawaii,” Vorhulst said. “The big island. The volcano Kilauea is erupting, and what you see is its lava flowing into the sea. As it flows along, each little stream begins to cool on the outside, and so it forms a sort of a pipe of hardened stone that the liquid lava flows on through. Only, sometimes the lava breaks through the pipe. Then you see these isolated patches of red-hot lava shining out.” He gave the class time to wonder why they were looking at Hawaii when the subject had ostensibly been the moon. Then he touched his controller again. Now the screen displayed Dr. Vorhulst himself along with a rather good-looking young woman in a skimpy sunsuit. They were standing at the entrance to what looked like an overgrown cave in the middle of a tropical rain forest.
“That’s Annie Shkoda there with me,” Vorhulst told the class. “She was my thesis adviser in Hilo—and don’t get any ideas, because about a month after that picture was taken she married somebody else. What we’re just about to go into there is what Americans call the Thurston Lava Tube. I prefer the Hawaiian name, which is Nahuku, because actually the man named Thurston that the other name comes from had nothing to do with the tube. He was just a newspaper publisher who campaigned for creating the Volcanoes National Park. Anyway, what happened was that maybe four or five hundred years ago Kilauea—or possibly the earlier volcano, Mauna Loa—was in eruption. It poured out lava; the lava formed tubes. When the lava stopped flowing, the liquid stuff ran out of the tubes. But the tubes remained as great big pipes of rock. Over time they got covered up with mud and dirt and God knows what, but they were still there.” He paused, looking up at the rows of students. “Anyone care to guess what this has to do with the moon?” Twenty hands went up at once. Vorhulst picked the boy next to Ranjit. “Yes, Jude?”
The boy stood up eagerly. “There were volcanoes on the moon, too.”
The professor nodded. “You bet there were. Not very recently, because the moon is so small it cooled off long ago. But we can still see where there were humongous ones, where the basaltic lava flows still cover hundreds of square kilometers, and there are plenty of domes on the moon—on the plains or actually inside a crater—that are probably volcanic in origin. And if there are flows and domes, there was lava, and if there was lava, there was what?”
“Lava tubes!” a dozen students said at once—Ranjit being one of them.
“Lava tubes, exactly,” Vorhulst agreed. “On Earth, tubes like Nahuku rarely grow to more than a couple of meters in diameter, but the moon is a different matter. In the moon’s trivial gravity they could grow ten times as big—could grow to the size of the Chunnel between England and France. And they’re sitting there, waiting for some human being to come along and dig down to one of them and caulk it—very thoroughly caulk it—and fill it with air…and then rent out bedroom space in it to immigrants from Earth.” He looked up at the timing light over the screen, which had gone from green to amber and was now flashing red. “And that’s the end of today’s session,” he said.
But, as a matter of fact, it really wasn’t because at least a dozen hands were still up. Dr. Vorhulst cast a rueful glance at the implacably red timing light, but surrendered. “All right,” he said. “One more question. What is it?”
Several of the hand raisers dropped their own hands to turn eagerly toward a boy Ranjit had seen in the company of the boy who was his seatmate, Jude. He spoke right up, as though he had been waiting for his chance. “Dr. Vorhulst,” he said, “a few of us would like to know your opinion on something. What you say often sounds as though you think intelligent life might be quite common in the galaxy. Do you think that is true?”
Vorhulst gave him a quizzical look. “Come on, guys! How do I know some of you don’t have brothers-in-law who work as newspaper reporters? And if I say what you want me to say, what’s the story going to be, ‘University Stargazer Claims Countless Alien Races Will Compete with Humanity’?”
The boy stood his ground. “Do you?” he asked.
Vorhulst sighed. “All right,” he said. “It’s a fair question and I’ll give you a fair answer. I know of no scientific reason why there could not be a number, perhaps a quite la
rge number, of life-bearing planets in our galaxy, nor of any scientific reason why some number of them have not developed scientifically advanced civilizations. That’s the truth. I have never denied it. Of course,” he added, “I’m not talking about your crazy superbeings out of the comics who want to make us humans their slaves, or maybe exterminate us entirely. Like—what were their names? Superman’s enemies that his father had captured before their planet blew up and put into a floating space prison that looked sort of like a cubical paperweight, only something happened and they all got loose?”
A voice from the back row was already shouting, “You mean General Zod?” And another voice came up with, “And the girl, Urna.” And then half a dozen others put in, “And Non!”
The professor gave them all a grin. “I’m happy to see that so many of you are so well versed in the classics. Anyway, trust me on this. They don’t exist. No hideous space aliens are going to decide to exterminate us, and now let’s get out of here before they call the campus police.”
Although Dr. Joris Vorhulst had never heard of the Grand Galactics or any of their client species—and would have been likely to give a very different answer if he had—he, technically, was still quite right in what he said. No space aliens were going to decide to exterminate the human race. The only space aliens interested in the subject had already made the decision to do so and had then gone on to more entertaining matters.
The Grand Galactics were not motivated to keep their turf clear of inimical species out of any notion of living in peace and amity. What they desired, and attained, was an existence with the least possible distraction from their main interests. Some of these interests had to do with their plans for an ideal galactic environment, which they had some hope of attaining in another ten or twenty billion years. Other interests were more like what humans might call the appreciation of beauty.
The Grand Galactics found many things “beautiful,” including what humans would describe as numbering, nucleonics, cosmology, string (and non-string) theory, causality, and many other areas. In their enjoyment of the fundamental aspects of nature, they might spend centuries—millennia, if they chose—contemplating the rich spectral changes as, one by one, some single atom lost its orbital electrons. Or they might study the distribution of prime numbers greater than 1050, or the slow maturation of a star from wispy gas and thin-scattered particles through the initiation of nuclear burning to its terminal state as a cooling white dwarf or, again, as a cloud of wisps and particles.
Oh, they did have other concerns. One, for example, was their project of increasing the proportion of heavy elements relative to primordial hydrogen in the galaxy’s chemical makeup. (They had a valid reason for this program, but not one that contemporary human beings would have understood.) Their other concerns were even less comprehensible to the likes of humanity. But, yes, they did consider the suppression of potentially dangerous civilizations worth doing.
Therefore the data concerning planet Earth required action. Their cease and desist order radioed to the human planet at light’s lazy stroll was still years from reaching its target. It would not be enough. Would not matter at all, in fact, because more urgent action was required. These upstart bipedal vertebrates not only possessed the technology of nuclear fission and fusion to an extent capable of creating inconveniencing weaponry, they already possessed a vast planetwide weapons industry to build on. The situation was even more annoying than the Grand Galactics had supposed, and they did not tolerate annoyance well.
They elected to terminate this particular annoyance.
When the Grand Galactics wished to convey an instruction to one of their client races, they had several delivery systems available. There was, for example, simple radio, efficient but ponderously slow. No electromagnetic signal—light, radar, that kind of thing—could go any faster than Dr. Einstein’s beloved c, which is to say an absolute maximum speed of some three hundred thousand kilometers a second. The Grand Galactics had devised some faster machines, sneaking through loopholes in relativity, but those were at most four or five times more speedy.
The Grand Galactics themselves, however—or any detachable fragment of them—being what ineffably nonbaryonic beings they were, suffered no such limitations. For reasons connected with the geometry of ten-dimensional space-time, their travel was composed of a number of laps, a to b, then b to c, then from c perhaps a straight shot to their destination. For each lap, however, transit time was always zero, whether across the diameter of a proton or from the galaxy’s core to its farthest-flung spiral arm.
So they took the inconvenient step of detaching a fragment of themselves to carry the instruction to the One Point Fives, and so the One Point Fives had their marching orders almost as soon as the Grand Galactics had decided to give them. And because the One Point Fives had anticipated what the decision would be, they were already in full marching order by the time the orders came.
The One Point Fives saw no reason to delay. Their invasion armada was quite ready to launch. They launched it.
To be sure, the One Point Fives were wholly material and thus not exempted from the speed-of-light rule. Roughly a human generation would pass before the armada could reach its destination and exterminate the undesirable species. But it was on its way.
6
MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH
Things were looking up for Ranjit Subramanian—well, they were, that is, if you didn’t count the fact that Gamini was still nine thousand kilometers away and Ranjit’s own father might almost as well have been. And things were hotting up again in Iraq, where muscular Christian thugs with assault rifles were guarding one end of a bridge that they didn’t want crossed by Islamists; the bridge was guarded at the other side by equally husky and well-armed Islamists who didn’t want Christians polluting their side of the river.
There were many more such things going on, but those certainly weren’t the things that were giving some provisional happiness to Ranjit.
Such things did exist, though. He was not only enjoying Astronomy 101, he was doing very well in it. The worst of his quizzes received scores in the upper eighties, the goodwill of his teacher (as measured in the compliments he gave Ranjit’s questions and discussion) scoring perhaps even higher. Of course, Dr. Vorhulst found some way to compliment nearly everyone else in the class, too. It wasn’t just that he was an indulgent or lazy teacher, Ranjit decided. More likely it was that no one would sign up for his class who wasn’t fascinated by the idea of sometime, somehow seeing human beings going off to visit some of those bizarre other worlds. When Ranjit got his third straight hundred on a quiz, it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps he might actually have the makings of the kind of student who would make his father proud.
So as an experiment he tried taking his other classes a bit more seriously. He checked his philosophy teacher’s list of extra-credit reading and picked a book that had at least an interesting title. But when he took Thomas Hobbes’s great work Leviathan home, it quickly stopped being interesting. Was Hobbes saying that the human mind was like a machine? Ranjit wasn’t sure. Nor could he make sense of, say, the distinction between meritum congrui and meritum condigni. And while he was quite confident he knew what Hobbes was saying when he praised a “Christian state” as the highest form of government, that was not a notion that appealed to the doggedly agnostic son of the head priest of a Hindu temple. Nothing in Hobbes, for that matter, seemed very relevant to the life of anybody Ranjit knew. Glumly he took the book back to the library and headed to his room, hoping for nothing but a peaceful hour’s nap.
He found two letters waiting for him. One was in a creamy-textured envelope embossed with the university’s golden seal. Most likely, Ranjit thought, a notice from the student banking people to inform him that his father had sent along another quarter’s dorm rent. But the other was from London and thus from Gamini. Ranjit ripped it open at once.
If he had hoped that hearing from Gamini would brighten this unsatisfactory day,
he was disappointed once more. It didn’t. The letter was short and it did not at any point say that Gamini was missing him. What it principally talked about was attending a performance of one of Shakespeare’s less amusing comedies at something called the Barbican. For some reason, Gamini said, the director had dressed the entire cast in featureless white, so that half the time neither he nor Madge had been able to tell who was speaking.
It was, Ranjit realized as he reached for the letter on university stationery, the third, maybe the fourth, time Gamini had mentioned this Madge person. He was contemplating the possible implications of this fact while extracting a letter on the same creamy paper as the envelope, and then Gamini’s possible failing went right out of his mind. The stationery was engraved with the name of the dean of students, and the letter said:
Please present yourself at the office of the Dean at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday next. It is alleged that during the school year just past you made unlawful use of the computer password of a faculty member. You are urged to bring with you any documents or other material that you consider relevant to this charge.
And it was signed by the dean of students.
According to her nameplate the woman at the dean’s reception desk was a Tamil, which was encouraging, but she was also as old as Ranjit’s father. Her look was cold. “You are expected,” she informed him. “You may go right into the dean’s private office.”