He passed through the vestibule between this dronehull and the next. He went directly to Herndon's office. Herndon, like himself, was newly endowed with authority. He was actually a mining-and-minerals man and a youthful prodigy in that field, but when the director of the colony was taken ill while a supply ship was aground, he went back to the home planet and command devolved on Herndon. I wonder, thought Massy, if he feels as shaky as I do?
When he entered the office, Herndon sat listening to a literal hash of noises coming out of a speaker on his desk. The cryptic signal had been relayed to him, and a recorder stored it as it came. There were cracklings and squeals and moaning sounds, and sputters and rumbles and growls. But behind the façade of confusion there was a tiny, interrupted, high-pitched noise. It was a monotone whining not to be confused with the random sounds accompanying it. Sometimes it faded almost to inaudibility, and sometimes it was sharp and clear. But it was a distinctive sound in itself, and it was made up of short whines and longer ones of two durations only.
"I've put Riki at making a transcription of what we've got," said Herndon with relief as he saw Massy. "She'll make short marks for the short sounds, and long ones for the long. I've told her to try to separate the groups. We've got a full half hour of it, already."
Massy made an inspired guess.
"I would expect it to be the same message repeated over and over," he said. He added, "And I think it would be decoded by guessing at the letters in two-letter and three-letter words, as clues to longer ones. That's quicker than statistical analysis of frequency."
Herndon instantly pressed buttons under his phoneplate. He relayed the information to Riki, his sister, as if it were gospel. Massy remembered guiltily that it wasn't gospel. It was simply a trick recalled from his boyhood, when he was passionately interested in secret languages. His interest had faded when he realized he had no secrets to record or transmit.
Herndon turned from the phone-plate.
"Riki says she's already learned to recognize some groups," he reported, "but thanks for the advice. Now what?"
Massy sat down. He'd have liked some coffee, but he was being treated with such respect that the role of demigod was almost forced on him.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that the increased cold out here might not be local. Sunspots—"
Herndon jittered visibly. He silently handed over a sheet of paper with observation-figures on top and a graph below them which related the observations, to each other. They were the daily, at-first-routine, measurements of the solar constant from Lani III. The graph-line almost ran off the paper at the bottom.
"To look at this," he admitted, "you'd think the sun was going out. Of course it can't be," he added hastily. "Not possibly! But there is an extraordinary number of sunspots. Maybe they'll clear. But meanwhile the amount of heat reaching us is dropping. As far as I know there's no parallel to it. Night temperatures are thirty degrees lower than they should be. Not only here, either, but at all the robot weather stations that have been spotted around the planet. They average forty below zero minimum, instead of ten. And there is that terrific lot of sunspots..."
He looked hopefully at Massy. Massy frowned. Sunspots are things about which nothing can be done. Yet the habitability of a borderline planet, anyhow, can very well depend on them. An infinitesimal change in sun heat can make a serious change in any planet's temperature. In the books, the ancient mother planet Earth was said to have entered glacial periods through a drop of only three degrees in the planet-wide temperature, and to have been tropic almost to its poles from a rise of only six. It had been guessed that glacial periods in the planet where humanity began had been caused by coincidences of sunspot maxima.
This planet was already glacial to its equator. There was a genuinely abnormal number of sunspots on Lani, its sun. Sunspots could account for worsening conditions here, perhaps. That message from the inner planet could be bad, thought Massy, if the solar constant drops and stays down a while. But aloud he said:
"There couldn't be a really significant permanent change. Not quickly, anyhow. Lani's a Sol-type star, and they aren't variables, though of course any dynamic system like a sun will have cyclic modifications of one sort or another. But they usually cancel out."
He sounded encouraging, even to himself. But there was a stirring behind him. Riki Herndon had come silently into her brother's office. She looked pale. She put papers down on her brother's desk.
"But," she said evenly, "while cycles sometimes cancel, sometimes they enhance each other. They heterodyne. That's what's happening."
Massy scrambled to his feet, flushing. Herndon said sharply:
"What? Where'd you get that stuff, Riki?"
She nodded at the sheaf of papers she'd just laid down.
"That's the news from home." She nodded again, to Massy. "You were right. It was the same message, repeated over and over. And I decoded it like children decode each other's secret messages. I did that to Ken once. He was twelve, and I decoded his diary, and I remember how angry he was that I'd found out he didn't have any secrets."
She tried to smile. But Herndon wasn't listening. He read swiftly. Massy saw that the under sheets were rows of dots and dashes, painstakingly transcribed and then decoded. There were letters under each group of marks.
Herndon was very white when he'd finished. He handed the sheet to Massy. Riki's handwriting was precise and clear. Massy read:
"FOR YOUR INFORMATION THE SOLAR CONSTANT IS DROPPING RAPIDLY DUE TO COINCIDENCE OF CYCLIC VARIATIONS IN SUNSPOT ACTIVITY WITH PREVIOUS UNOBSERVED LONG CYCLES APPARENTLY INCREASING THE EFFECT MAXIMUM IS NOT YET REACHED AND IT IS EXPECTED THAT THIS PLANET WILL BECOME UNINHABITABLE FOR A TIME ALREADY KILLING FROST HAVE DESTROYED CROPS IN SUMMER HEMISPHERE IT IS IMPROBABLE THAT MORE THAN A SMALL PART OF THE POPULATION CAN BE SHELTERED AND WARMED THROUGH DEVELOPING GLACIAL CONDITIONS WHICH WILL REACH TO EQUATOR IN TWO HUNDRED DAYS THE COLD CONDITIONS ARE COMPUTED TO LAST TWO THOUSAND DAYS BEFORE NORMAL SOLAR CONSTANT RECURS THIS INFORMATION IS SENT YOU TO ADVISE IMMEDIATE DEVELOPMENT OF HYDROPONIC FOOD SUPPLY AND OTHER PRECAUTIONS MESSAGE ENDS FOR YOUR INFORMATION THE SOLAR CONSTANT IS DROPPING RAPIDLY DUE TO COINCIDENCE OF CYCLIC—"
Massy looked up. Herndon's face was ghastly. Massy said in some grimness:
"Kent IV's the nearest world your planet could hope to get help from. A mail liner will make it in two months. Kent IV might be able to send three ships—to get here in two months more. That's no good!"
He felt sick. Human-inhabited planets are far apart. The average distance of stars—of all types—there is on an average between four and five light-years of distance between suns. They are two months' spaceship journey apart. And not all stars are Sol-type or have inhabited planets. Colonized worlds are like isolated islands in an unimaginably vast ocean, and the ships that ply between them at thirty light-speeds seem merely to creep. In ancient days on the mother planet Earth, men sailed for months between ports, in their clumsy sailing ships. There was no way to send messages faster than they could travel. Nowadays there was little improvement. News of the Lani disaster could not be transmitted. It had to be carried, as between stars, and carriage was slow and response to news of disaster was no faster.