“Actually, Mars lies within the habitable zone, and Venus is marginal, but yes that’s the gist of it. Temperature is the variable. If we could modulate the amount of solar energy reaching those planets — send more sunlight to Mars or the moons of Jupiter, offer Venus some shade — then terraforming moves from science fiction pipe dream to plausible reality. We would also be able to shut down global warming here, and make the Earth a little more habitable again.”
Carter felt a glimmer of understanding. “Manipulating sunlight. Smoke and mirrors on a planetary scale. That’s what you were trying to do.”
“Not trying,” Fallon said, with more than a little pride. “We did it. We stopped the sun for ninety seconds.”
“How?”
“Like you said. Smoke and mirrors. More mirrors than smoke, actually.”
She nodded at Tanaka. “You said it was an optical test. You used microwaves to heat the ionosphere and create a plasma lens, right?”
“The ionosphere? That’s nothing.” Fallon returned his attention to the computer for a moment, entering a final command. “Do you know what a Dyson Swarm is?”
“Is it anything like a Dyson Sphere?”
Fallon nodded. “The Dyson Swarm is a variation on Freeman Dyson’s theoretical proposition that a sufficiently advanced species would, out of necessity, need to utilize all the available energy from its home star. One way to do this is the Dyson Sphere, a shell built around the star, collecting all the radiant energy. As engineering projects go, that would be pretty ambitious. You would need several planets worth of raw materials to create something like that. The Dyson Swarm proposes using free orbiting solar collector satellites rather than a solid structure. Obviously, that would greatly reduce the amount of energy that could be collected, but the yield would be tremendous. Enough energy to colonize the entire solar system. Maybe even fuel interstellar near-light-speed spacecraft. Last year, astronomers observed unusual fluctuations in the light coming from a star 1,400 light years away. The most plausible explanation for these dimming periods is a Dyson Swarm, built by an intelligent alien civilization.”
“I’ve heard about that. I’ve also heard that they probably aren’t alien structures at all, but comet fragments.”
Fallon smiled. “They aren’t comet fragments. And they aren’t alien megastructures, either. When Dyson first proposed his idea in 1960, he couldn’t conceive of any other way to harness a star’s energy, but today we know that light can be focused and refracted with strong magnetic fields. With the technology that we have today, it’s possible to utilize a considerable portion of the sun’s energy without building a physical shell or a swarm of collection satellites. All we need, is a few of those.”
He pointed at the wall screen, which now displayed an image of what appeared to be the Earth, viewed from space. Just visible in the faint blue band where the Earth’s atmosphere meets the vacuum of space, was a jagged black shape.
“Its unofficial name is ‘the Black Knight Satellite.’ It’s an electromagnetic anomaly orbiting the Earth, first detected in 1899 by Nikola Tesla, while he was conducting radio experiments. But he had no idea what it was. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when the idea of sending man-made satellites into orbit became a reality that anyone considered the possibility that the signals Tesla picked up might be coming from an object already in orbit. Over the next two decades, there were several sightings from reputable sources — U.S. Air Force pilots, naval tracking stations, astronauts. The government moved quickly to cover them up, dismissing interest in the phenomenon as UFO hysteria. In 1973, a Scottish astronomer published his hypothesis that the object was an alien space probe that had been in orbit for thousands of years. Somewhere along the line, the name ‘Black Knight’ stuck.”
“Aliens?” Carter made no effort to hide her smile.
Fallon seemed not to have heard her. “NASA says it’s a thermal blanket from the International Space Station.”
Carter took another look at the object on the screen. It did sort of look like a crumpled-up blanket floating in zero-G. “You’re sure it’s not?”
“Could a blanket do this?”
As if on cue, the misshapen object on the screen began to expand and swell, like a bag of popcorn in a microwave oven. In a matter of seconds, it transformed into a perfectly symmetrical sphere, glowing brighter and brighter until the screen was filled with radiance.
Fallon turned away, looked at Carter. “That’s our mirror. The footage you’re seeing is from a satellite I sent up six months ago to keep an eye on it. From a discreet distance, of course. This is from three hours ago. The test.”
Three hours ago, Carter thought. When the earthquakes hit.
A full minute passed before the brilliance receded to a pinpoint, and as the afterglow faded, Carter saw that the object had returned to its original irregular shape. She turned back to Fallon. “What is it?”
“It’s a meta-material. Carbon nanotubes spiraling around an alloy core of copper, with tungsten and molybdenum. At least we think so.”
“You think?”
“The experimental results are consistent with that identification,” Fallon said. “Our hypothesis is that the satellite was originally part of a larger structure that almost collided with the Earth. The main body fell into a near-polar orbit, while smaller pieces fell to Earth as meteorites. Fragments of the same material have been recovered at various meteor impact sites around the planet, which is how we were able to confirm the age of the satellite. It’s 13,000 years old.
“The U.S. government took an interest in it after World War II. We know that because civilians investigating the Roswell crash in 1947 reported finding a piece of metal that was as pliable as fabric, but always returned to its original shape.”
“Roswell? Aliens again?”
Fallon shook his head. “What crashed at Roswell was an experimental military aircraft utilizing a piece of the meta-material recovered from one of the Black Knight meteorites. An early attempt at a stealth plane. The so-called ‘alien bodies’ recovered from the site were ordinary human test pilots who experienced a physical alteration after exposure to the meta-material. It’s safe to handle under everyday conditions, but when stimulated it can have…unpredictable results.”
Carter wanted to hear more about unpredictable results but Fallon didn’t give her a chance to ask.
“Roswell was a rare failure. Almost every significant technological breakthrough in the last fifty years came out of the effort to reverse engineer that meta-material. Just the effort, mind you. No one has been able to duplicate it.”
“Is it alien?”
“The Black Knight is extraterrestrial in origin, as was the meta-material used in the Roswell aircraft. By extraterrestrial, I mean that it didn’t originate on Earth. That doesn’t mean that it’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence, though.”
Carter got the distinct impression Fallon believed that to be the case, even if he wasn’t willing to go on record with it. “How did you activate it?”
“I managed to acquire the Roswell meta-material fragment — a case of being in the right place at the right time with the right offer. By incorporating it into our antenna array, we were able to generate a focused beam of microwave radiation at the precise frequency of the satellite, which produced a sympathetic electromagnetic field around it. EM fields can refract or magnify light just as effectively as a glass lens. More effectively, since the photons don’t have to interact with a solid medium. The sun produces a staggering amount of energy, of which only an infinitesimal fraction reaches Earth. The trick is producing and maintaining a field big enough to manipulate that fraction.”