The Pathfinder Project (31 page)

“Yeah, I know,” said Kaufield,
jerking a thumb in Warren’s direction. “So what does that make
him
?
According to Dr. Simmons, he’s an emotional basket case. He regularly endures
severe fits of guilt, both at what his people did to us and at what he tried to
do here on the
Pathfinder
. She’s actually had to begin giving him
medication in order to keep him stable enough to work here in the restaurant.”

“We’re never going to have all
the answers if we can’t return home and find out,” Glen predicted. “That’s the
only thing that bothers me about being out here, Captain.
What is happening
back home?
” He looked at his watch with a frown. “I’d better be getting
back to work or they’ll be calling for me. Thanks for the chat.”

“My pleasure,” Kaufield replied
sincerely. “And thank you, by the way, for the update on Warren’s
communications device… it saves me from having to stop by later and disturb
your work.”

His next stop was the
Observatory wing, or Julie’s ‘office’. He entered through the hatchway and
noticed that the area was bustling with activity. On one table in the center of
the wing were a series of laptop computers. Thomas, Kari and three other
members of Julie’s staff were busy installing updated software onto them. He
immediately noticed the obvious attraction in the smiles between Thomas and his
new girlfriend. He chuckled quietly… a new, fresh bond of love was definitely
forming rapidly between the two of them. Considering all that Thomas had
endured to preserve the safety of both ship and crew, the Captain figured that
the young scientist had a few happier days owed to him. He was pleased to see
things working out.

Julie herself was busy studying
several images captured by telescope. She had them displayed side by side on
the monitor at her work station, and Kaufield took a quick glance at them as he
eased into an empty chair next to her.

“Good afternoon, Captain.” She
said pleasantly enough.

“Good afternoon,” he replied.
“Have you decided where you’d like to take the ship next?”

“Are you getting anxious to
explore some more?” she asked.

“Absolutely, Doctor. We’ve
moved around so far and so fast that I get absolutely itchy if we just sit around
in one area for too long.”

She smirked at his attitude and
pointed to a spot on the right picture. “How about here?” she asked carefully,
and his gaze moved from her face to the tip of her finger. A small,
for-the-most-part spiral-shaped galaxy sat in its center. Her finger was
pointing to a bright white spot in the center of one of its spiral arms.

“What’s causing the bright
spot? The latest mystery for the day?” guessed the Captain.

“Exactly,” she replied. “But
it’s
not
a bright spot. This picture is a modified copy of the image on
the left with darker areas enhanced. So the regions without a lot of light look
whiter and vice versa.” It was her turn to look at him. “For some reason I
cannot fathom, there are a lot of variable low-intensity stars in that vicinity
and I’m very curious as to what the cause is. Normally, you would find most of
them scattered randomly about amongst the other stars, not clumped together in
one big bunch like that. The central computer identifies all kinds of ‘out of
the ordinary’ patterns for us each day, but it kicked this one out at the top
of the list.”

“Why?” queried Kaufield. “So
you’ve got a series of cooler stars grouped together. What’s so special about
that?” He shrugged. “It’s probably just one of the random things that you will
occasionally find out here when there are trillions of different objects all
scattered about.”

“It came out at the top of the
list because Glen’s group in the Lab is also picking up man-made
electromagnetic transmissions from that same area. He confirmed the discovery
for me immediately.”

“Really,” the Captain said,
sounding a little taken aback. “I had lunch with him a few minutes ago and I
definitely don’t remember him mentioning
that
.”

“He must have wanted you to be
surprised,” she theorized, then pointed again at the picture. “The signals we
received are
very
weak, sporadic, and
extremely
old. There’s no
way to translate or convert them to anything we could read or view. They’ve
traveled a long way to get here at light speed, so it’s very fortunate for us
that they haven’t deteriorated to the point where we would be unable to
determine if they’re artificial or natural in origin.” Before he could ask she
continued, “And we also ran into them the old-fashioned way, so no I
don’t
think they have anything whatsoever to do with whoever transmitted your
infamous ‘universe diagram’.”

“But it is a definite sign of
intelligent life like our own,” Dennis decided.

“Affirmative,” Julie replied.
“I recommend we go here next, Captain,” she said, placing the tip of her finger
directly on top of the bright area in the center of the picture. “Take us to
the fourth spiral arm of celestial object PGC-2014206, please.”

“Excuse me?” he asked, a bit
confused by the reference.

“Oh, we’ve
long
since
exhausted our old methods of charting objects in the universe,” she pointed
out, eager to expound on her staff’s accomplishments. “So we developed a new
system that allows the computer to keep everything nice and organized for us.
PGC-2014206
stands for ‘Pathfinder Galaxy Cluster number two million, fourteen thousand,
two hundred and six’. That’s where we’ll find the source of those
transmissions, probably sent over six thousand years ago by a culture which –
at that time – had only limited technology. Our experts predict the people
living there would have just discovered global communications like television
and radio. As their technology improves and space travel becomes more normal
they soon learn to put up orbiting geo-synchronous satellites and keep more and
more of their wireless activity localized.”

“You’ve charted over two
million objects already?” Kaufield gasped.

“
Puh-leez
Captain,”
Julie said, shaking her head at him. “You’re the
leader
of this project…
you know what our computers can do. PGC stands for
Pathfinder Galaxy Cluster
…”
she repeated. “We’ve charted over two million known
galaxies
like our
own Milky Way so far. We’re also attempting to document ideal stars and planets
in each of them, the best prospects for containing fresh water and indigenous
life… that
really
keeps the computer busy. Most of the galaxies in our
catalogue are only partially mapped – our system is programmed to pick out key
stars, nebulae, and other objects that assist us with navigation and record
those first. By the time it’s done crunching all the numbers for our primary
targets and ready for the secondary ones we’re generally ready to move the ship
along and explore farther.”

“I know, I just said that so
you could brag,” he said, keeping his expression deadpan so she couldn’t tell
if he was fibbing or not. “Although we may have to make a few more trips
through the universe before you can map
everything
, I take it.”

“I’d say we’ll need a few
hundred
thousand
additional trips,” she said, correcting him with a pleased smile.
“We’re traveling in
one
basic direction away from our Milky Way in an
ever-expanding three dimensional sphere, remember? Plus you have to take into
account that our ability to record and store information is limited to the
speed of our computer systems, not to mention all the other
little
things like the stars that occasionally go super nova, crash into each other,
and so on…”

“Fine, I admit it. Your work is
very
impressive, Dr. Markham,” Dennis said, a little too defensively for
her taste. “If you’ll pass your target coordinates on to the Lab wing, I’ll
leave orders with them to make the next transit in an hour or so.”

“I can
tell
that you’re
impressed,” she shouted after him, watching his back as he turned and headed
back toward the exit hatches. “Don’t you love a good mystery now and then,
Captain?” She asked. “For instance, have those people who originally sent the
transmissions that Glen received established a working, peaceful society or are
they long dead? I myself simply cannot wait to find out!”

*    
* * *     *

The first star system they
passed by in the fourth spiral arm of PGC-2014206 revealed little new
information – at first. It was simply a blue giant star that they were viewing
extremely late in its short life span. Such stars were well-known for
squandering their limited fuel at a phenomenally quick rate over the course of
a few million years or so. It had no doubt blazed quite radiantly during that
time, but now was slowly on its way toward evolving into a red giant. Soon
after, it would quite probably disappear in the giant blast of a supernova.

“
But why is it here, in one
of the inner spiral arms
?
” Dr. Markham asked from the open Comm-link
next to Dennis. He was back in his seat on the Command Dome, carefully
monitoring the results of each of the three CAS transits the
Pathfinder
had properly executed in the past twenty minutes. They had carefully approached
the galaxy, and… sensing no danger from either the Canary probes or their own
motion sensors, gradually moved in toward the coordinates specified earlier
that afternoon by Julie.

“Why shouldn’t it be?” Dennis
replied. “It’s just one scattered amongst the billions of others in this
galaxy, is it not?”

“
You really need to start
reading the background information I include along with my regular reports
,”
Julie decided. “
This entire area is filled with blue and super-giant stars
like the one on your overhead monitor, Captain. This star
even
has a
series of asteroid belts orbiting it... a definite indication that it once had
the ability to form planets. Blue giants generally start out as very bright
stars, but they burn so brightly and quickly that they have an extremely short
life span. They don’t usually live long enough to drift this far inward toward
a Galaxy’s center. So finding a couple dozen of them in this area would be totally
normal, but our discovery of
11,000
is a genuine mystery that I would
like to make every effort to solve
.”

“11,000?”

“
That’s right
,” she
replied confidently. “
And one of the four fading stars in this immediate
location is the projected source of the transmissions that Glen received
.
Until
we got here and found nothing I was pretty much convinced that it
was
this
system
.”

“So you’re saying that as
recently as six thousand years ago there was a star system inhabited by living
beings out there, at or within a few light years of
this
particular
star.”

“
Within ten light years,
unquestionably
,” she replied. “
So I hope you can understand my
puzzlement when we currently can’t find a star with normal enough emissions to
support planets and biological life within a hundred and twelve light year
radius.
”

“What the hell happened between
then and now?” Kaufield wondered out loud.

“Maybe it wasn’t biological
life that was here,” Adam suggested warily from his station. “Maybe it was
something completely new and never before encountered.”

“
But this star and its
neighbors
looked
like totally normal yellow stars from our previous
position earlier this morning
,” insisted Julie. “
We were situated
exactly 6,217 light years distant when I viewed this spiral arm through one of
our telescopes and Glen picked up the old signals. So if you take into account
that those transmissions and the light from the stars in this galaxy travel at
the speed of light, that means we were viewing this area earlier today as it
was 6,217 years ago
.” She paused to let everyone think about that for a
moment. “
It’s why I was so sure the source of those radio and television
signals would be here, and also why I was only expecting to find a cluster of  
9,500
dimmed stars
.”

Mary turned around in shock and
stared at Kaufield. “So those asteroid belts out there…” she couldn’t bring
herself to say the words and just gazed in astonishment at the picture of the
star on the overhead monitors above them.

“
Those asteroid belts are
quite probably all that is left of the planets that used to orbit this star
,”
Dr. Markham said, finishing Mary’s statement for her. “
And since we can now
accurately project a timeline based on our previous position from this morning,
at least 1,500 additional stars have been damaged somehow and lost most of
their radiant energy within the past 6,217 years
.”

“That means whatever the hell
caused all this is still spreading,” Kaufield said, his own voice a little
shaky. “About four stars per year are going dark. I would imagine the repeated
shockwaves generated as each star suddenly transitions into a blue giant is
also what destroys the orbiting planetary objects.”

“
Agreed
,” Julie said in
reply. “
Whether it’s some sort of natural phenomenon or a disaster caused by
man-made technology remains to be seen, but
something
in the arm of this
galaxy is most definitely destroying entire stars at a pretty steady rate
.”

“Oh you can bet it will be some
type of weapon that was made by people,” concluded Adam pessimistically. “It’s
a weapon made by angry people who are at war with each other. We haven’t found
any
natural phenomenon in
all
of our history that can move faster than light
between stars. Four stars destroyed per year is a pretty damning indicator in
my opinion.”