No, it’s not quite the same as fine jewels or bouquets of flowers. But once you forget about his being a genius, McAndrew’s a simple man. When it comes to compliments I settle for what I can get.
McAndrew had known that several of the Arks had been launched far north of the ecliptic when he played me Fogarty’s message. He did the background research before we left, and it was all in the Merganser’s data banks.
I sifted through the material one morning, while McAndrew sat in a habitual stupor of advanced physics and the ship raced out toward the fiery point of the Cassiopeia supernova. The Sun had already shrunk behind us to a point of light and although we were crowding light-speed we didn’t seem to be moving.
There had been seventeen Arks, but only four of them were candidates for what we were seeking. Each of them was different and distinctive. You might expect that. Any group of people which decides to leave the rest of humanity and heads off on a one-way trip to the stars is likely to be a little odd.
The Ark of the Evangelist had set out to spread its version of the Word of God among the stars. It contained four thousand followers of the philosopher Socinus, which was probably all of them. The Word, from what I could see of it in the data base, was likely to baffle any alien who encountered it. Certainly, the Word baffled me.
The Ark of the Evangelist was equipped with unusually powerful communications equipment, able to beam messages ahead so that their ultimate arrival at another stellar system would be expected. The same equipment would, of course, also be able to send messages back toward Sol. None had ever been received, unless Paul Fogarty had picked up the first.
The Cyber Ark had no interest in evangelism. It had headed out toward Cassiopeia, but any direction would have done equally well. The Ark held two thousand computer specialists and the most advanced computing equipment that the Solar System could produce. The Ark ’s inhabitants were united in their disdain for the rules that limited the development of machine intelligence. They had vowed to produce real artificial intelligence, a true AI, and they claimed to know how exactly to do it. Their goal was an AI far beyond the known limits of either humans or machines. If they felt in a generous mood when they were done, well, they just might tell Earth when the work was finished.
Big talk. But if they had been successful, they had sent back no word in the fifty-nine years since they flew away from the Solar System.
Then there was the Ark of Noah. Its colonists had become convinced from their analysis of ancient religious writings that Armageddon and the end of Earth were close to hand. They had no faith in the survival of the colonies we had established on Mars, Titan, or Ceres. Inside the two-kilometer sphere of their ark, formed from a hollowed-out asteroid, they had tried to include a pair of every Earth species of plant and animal. Impossible, in practice — we were up to four million species of insects, and still counting. But the Ark of Noah gave it a good, all-out try, packing in a handful of every life-form they could find. They took liberties with the number of humans, two hundred instead of Noah’s single family; but somebody had to manage the Ark ’s life-support systems, if and when things went out of whack.
My own money was on the Amish Ark. When a group which shuns most forms of mechanical systems sets off into the void in as fundamentally high tech a structure as an artificial world, integration problems and equipment failures loom large as a source of possible trouble. The surprise was that the Ark had gone as far out as it had without killing everybody on board. The passengers — eight thousand of them at takeoff from Earth orbit, according to the roster — had been lucky to be able to send their weak call for help. Apparently they also didn’t know much about electronic signalling. Otherwise they’d have realized that only someone close to the Ark, or at a solar focus where the strength of any message was gravitationally concentrated, could possibly have heard them.
Of course, we were listening for a direct signal now, with the most sensitive equipment we had been able to place on board the Merganser. We knew the general direction of the lost Ark, and an approximate distance; but we might well be off a few hundred million kilometers, one way or the other.
After we came to our best estimate of the origin of the signal, we spent the next few days moving position, listening, and moving again. Nothing. I began to be discouraged. Not so McAndrew.
“Jeanie,” He said, “the chain of logic that led us here is clear and unbreakable. Keep looking, and we’ll find an Ark. ”
“The Amish.”
“You’re the one saying that, not me. But whichever Ark it is, once we find it we’ll be able to tell them that help is on the way.”
I was glad to hear him put it like that. Director Rumford couldn’t have been more explicit in our final meeting before we left the Institute.
“I’m approving the flight of the Merganser as an exploration mission,” he had said. “That’s the most I can do, because the Institute has no responsibility for search-and-rescue operations. I think you have a long shot — a very long shot — at finding someone in trouble. But remember that you are not a rescue party. There are only the two of you, in a small ship without special equipment. You are not trained for space rescue. If you find someone out there in trouble, call me and come back here. No heroics. No attempts at inspired space-engineering solutions. Leave that work to the specialists. Understand?”
“Of course.” McAndrew had agreed instantly, but I knew the man. He was itching to be on his way, and to get Rumford’s consent for the mission he’d have said anything.
Now, with the ark possibly no more than a few hours ahead, I was glad to hear him proposing talk rather than action.
Just to be sure, I rubbed in Director Rumford’s order one more time. “The colonists don’t seem to be in any great hurry for help, if they send only one message a year. A good thing, too — we have no room on Merganser for anyone else. If it comes to an all-up rescue mission, the United Space Federation will fly a whole fleet out this way.”
As I said that, I was secretly convinced that our whole journey would prove a waste of time. Before we left the Institute we had installed a loud signalling system on the Merganser, and for the past two days we had blared word of our presence and our location into the empty sky ahead of us.
Result: nothing.
The people on the Ark were deaf, or their receiving equipment was out of action; or maybe the Ark was over on the other side of the Sun, hundreds of billions of kilometers away, wandering around where Paul Fogarty had picked up the original signal.
We had reduced speed and turned off the balanced drive. At my insistence we had also switched off every possible source of electronic noise and were gliding forward through the void like a dead ship.
It was as well that we were so silent. Even with our electronic ears wide open, the Mayday signal that came in was barely above threshold. It was also well off to one side.
“That’s it!” Our receiving system automatically tuned to the direction of the source, and now McAndrew increased the gain to maximum. It didn’t help. Instead of a faint voice almost lost in white noise, we heard a loud voice equally unintelligible amid a thunderstorm of static.
“... receiving — input… signal… assistance — urgent…” And then, the first direct evidence that they had heard us. “... send… who you…”
“I have direction and distance,” I said. “Three-twenty-one million kilometers. Send a signal saying that we hear them. Tell them who we are, say we are on the way. Tell them they’ll hear nothing more from us for a while — we can’t send when the drive is on.”