Gordon Lee had other things to worry about.
In his left hand, he held the mystery—the clearest, most recent processed photo of the Deltans from the SSBA. For all of the array’s vaunted resolution and capability, though, this picture was little improvement over the one Lydia and Sykes had shown him years before. The glare from the Deltans’ photon drive simply blocked out all but the grossest of detail, and what was left behind looked like no ship Gordon could imagine. It was a false-color image of the central drive corona in brilliant blue-white, surrounded by four reddish shadows on the periphery of the drive’s circle.
The spacing of the shadows always seemed to suggest something to Gordon, but he had never put his finger on it. The three largest shadows formed the vertices of an equilateral triangle around the drive, with the smaller shadow nestled on the perimeter halfway between two of the vertices. And, as subsequent exposures showed, the four shadows rotated about the drive, always keeping their relative positions to one another, but rotating rigidly around nonetheless.
He softly crashed the pictures into one another again and then arched an eyebrow as a thought occurred to him. “Lagrange?” he asked to the empty room.
Before he could pursue that line of thought any further, there was a rapid knock upon the door and Melinda opened it without prompting. She had been a knockout when he hired her thirty years ago, primarily as eye-candy for jaded bureaucrats he tried to sell to, but she had proven to be capable beyond just her looks, a true asset to the company. In the intervening decades, she had traded gorgeous and voluptuous for glamorous and regal. Gordon was usually pleased to see her, but not when she interrupted him on the verge of something so big. “Damn it, Melinda—”
“Gordon, Castelworth’s duty monitor is on the line. She says she has an encrypted stream for your authorization.”
Gordon scowled. Castelworth was his Australian telemetry station, tracking and monitoring all the constellations of satellites Windward Tech maintained for both government and corporate clients. Why the hell would they need him to personally decrypt a transmission? “Can you ask—”
“Sir, it’s the Promise.”
Gordon shut his open mouth and nodded. He carefully laid his two photos down on his desk, one atop the other. He squared them precisely and then moved them off to the side, and tried to appear calm. Calm was not a good descriptor, though. Now, without anything to occupy his hands, his fingers drummed a rapid, complicated rhythm on the desk, a counterpoint to the numerous disparate trains of thought that tried to traverse his mind at the same time.
He looked up at Melinda and cleared his throat. Softly, he said. “Oh. Well, could you do me a favor and get in touch with Nathan for me. He should be here when we decrypt it. And Lydia Russ. Yeah, Lydia will never let me forget it if I leave her out. And Kris Muñoz and the Contact Evaluation Team, and the Physics Group, and the Astronomy Group, and, oh, and the Promise team, and—”
She smiled at his nervous fumbling. “How about I just follow your preplanned response? All those and more are already listed in the contact section. Remember? You wrote it before going senile a couple of minutes ago.”
“That would probably be for the best.” He tried to return her smile, but only got half of a crooked grin out.
Melinda shook her head and came up to the desk, reaching out to put one hand over his in reassurance. “You did it, Gordon. That’s what this means. The Promise is a success.” She squeezed his hand and then left, off to inform the company and the world that first contact had been made.
Shocked, Gordon continued to just sit there. He looked at his desk as if it might explode. Accessible within its active electronic surface was everything he had hoped for, prayed for, and feared for the last 22 years. He was a few keystrokes away from answers to questions that had consumed his life, but now at the critical moment, he was frozen in trepidation.
Besides, he reasoned, he really should wait for the others. It would mean more, experiencing it all with that highly elite crowd. That was the right thing to do.
He would not allow himself to be turned into some petulant child the night before Christmas. There would be no shaking of presents on his watch.
Gordon refused to spoil this.
No way.
Then his half grin broadened and lifted into an uncomfortably feral smile. “Yeah, right. Screw ‘em if they can’t handle being second.”
He tapped a capacitive control flush with surface of his desk and an integral keyboard and touchpad swelled out of the desktop, while a large expanse of the black lacquered surface became a wide monitor. Gordon logged on to Windward’s secure global network and clicked around until he was into Castelworth station’s server. There he performed a second login, scrolled over to the active and waiting telemetry streams and found a single icon that caused his heart to beat noticeably within his chest: the Promise.
Gordon held a breath for a moment and selected the icon. Streams of memorized pseudorandom digits tumbled forth from his fingertips and the decryption algorithm began to un-spool the compressed, jumbled data into several channels, all transmitted more than a year before.
One was a telemetry stream, which would help evaluate the health of the probe and the details of its encounter, but which would be completely unintelligible until processed by systems mirroring the probe itself. Then there was a communications log and a recording of all transmissions sent and received, the robotic equivalent of a cockpit voice recorder. Gordon hovered his cursor above this stream, anxious to hear what exchange there might have been with the aliens, but he did not select it. One of the other streams held an even greater allure.
The video log was an overview of all visual data and telemetry. He could see the encounter with the Deltans from the very moment Promise turned on its cameras. Though not as detailed as what would be found in the telemetry stream, it was immediately accessible.
Gordon selected it and saw that 43 minutes of video had been received, with more streaming in. He laughed. Due to the limits of relativity, from his perspective, Promise’s encounter was still “live”. Even though it had been transmitted a year before, to Earth it was as fresh as breaking news. To him, first contact was still going on. No one on the planet was as close to the Deltans as he was now.
Gordon started the video stream and leaned in, getting as close to the log and its various inset cameras as his in-desk monitor would allow. His eyes grew wide and he gasped in awe when the object of all his speculation swung into view. “It’s not a ship at all. Good god . . . .”
The probe grew closer to its quarry and he sighed, the only sound he made for minutes as history unfolded before him. Ten minutes later, he said to the empty room, “So that’s it. I was right—Lagrange points. Huh.”
Nothing happened after that, and Gordon grew impatient. He fast-forwarded the stream a bit, watching the encounter happen at four times the normal speed. Then, in minutes, he slowed again. “Here we go. Enough of this timid crap. Transmitting. Our first official words to the galaxy.”