Edgeworth replied warily. ‘This discovery does change the way we think about ourselves, President Ogorodnikov.’ Lenin turned his head toward his boss and spoke rapidly and quietly into his ear.
Ogorodnikov acknowledged the cautious response with a slight smile. ‘I would like you to call me Mikhail.’
Edgeworth returned the half-smile but didn’t reciprocate the offer of familiarity. ‘In the short term this will be a major shock, Mikhail. Learning that out there is at least one intelligence probably millions of years in advance of ours.’
The Prime Minister sensed, rather than saw, his translator at his side freezing up, and remembered that the FO man had been given no inkling of the purpose of the meeeting. The man recovered quickly and delivered Ogorodnikov’s reply, struggling to keep the astonishment out of his voice: ‘An intelligence which wishes to communicate with us, and which is prepared to give us knowledge thousands of years ahead of our time.’
Edgeworth turned to the man seated at the far end of the table. There would be no keeping him out of it. ‘What can Professor Velikhov tell us about this matter?’
Georgi Velikhov cleared his throat. There was a brief, three-way exchange in Russian between Ogorodnikov, his translator and the Academician. Then Velikhov was speaking in good English with a hint of Harvard American. ‘Gentlemen, the idea of searching for alien life is centuries old. In 1822 the mathematician Gauss thought there were people on the Moon, and they could be contacted using a system of mirrors. Others thought to signal Martians or lunar dwellers by digging geometric ditches in the Sahara, filling them with oil and setting them on fire.’
‘Can we skip a century or two?’ Edgeworth asked impatiently.
Velikhov continued: ‘The radio astronomers have been looking for extraterrestrial signals for almost fifty years. The pioneering work was carried out by an American called Frank Drake. He used a small radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. Now, all the world’s radio telescopes routinely look for meaningful chirps — signals in amongst the hiss of the galaxies and the echo of the Big Bang. Today’s equipment is ten trillion times more sensitive than Drake’s Project Ozma. And the Americans are using the world’s largest radio telescope, the Arecibo in Puerto Rico, to examine a thousand nearby star systems. But all this effort has produced nothing. We have heard only a great silence.’
‘The people inside the mountain weren’t using radio,’ Edgeworth pointed out.
Velikhov nodded. ‘Perhaps we have been foolish. Perhaps we should have realised that the aliens might have discovered more advanced methods of communication than anything we could imagine. All this time we have been looking for smoke signals.’
The FO man translated Ogorodnikov’s words. ‘Are people prepared for this news? Will there be panic in the streets?’
‘No. People see Captain Kirk fighting aliens on TV every day. And I suppose you know as well as I do, Mikhail, that there are ways of putting a message over to the public.’
‘Aha! Your famous spin doctors! I too have my “propagandisty”. But the matter goes much deeper than spin, Prime Minister. Look what happened to the American Indians when Europe invaded North America. Look what happened to the Mayan civilisation when the Spaniards arrived. Whenever a strong culture comes into contact with a weak one, the weak is exterminated.’
‘But we’re talking about the transmission of information, surely not the prospect of physical invasion.’
Velikhov cleared his throat again. ‘The distances involved in interstellar travel are huge. The technical problems even for an advanced civilisation…’
‘How can you put limits on the capabilities of an advanced civilisation?’ Ogorodnikov wanted to know.
Velikhov continued to speak English, while Lenin muttered into Ogorodnikov’s ear: ‘I don’t, Nature does. Nature has set up a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than light. No civilisation, however advanced, can break that limit. Mother Nature has also arranged for the Galaxy to be immense. Given these factors, colonisation by aliens would take an immense span of time. Our species could be extinct by the time they arrived in their starships. But the real question is, why would they want to conquer us? Do we want to conquer an ant heap? We have nothing to offer and are of no conceivable importance to them.’
‘This confirms my opinion,’ Edgeworth said. ‘There will be no panic. Intense interest, yes, but no blood in the streets. The Mayan and Native American civilisations were wiped out by physical contact. Disease and genocide did for them. What we have here is something different, a transmission of knowledge. Could that destroy our civilisation — mere knowledge?’
Ogorodnikov said, ‘It came close, Prime Minister, in the age of the Bomb.’
Edgeworth showed a polite scepticism. ‘Suppose that, in the time of Moses, there was a single telephone line, and that it connected him to our century. What would that have done to the pastoral societies of the day? Most of the knowledge would be so incomprehensible to them that they couldn’t have used it.’
Ogorodnikov was studying Edgeworth closely. The FO man translated his words. ‘So, what are you saying? That you agree with my Academician, here? That these aliens pose no threat?’
Edgeworth leaned forward across the table. ‘The threat of new knowledge doesn’t worry me. The threat of invasion doesn’t worry me.’
‘What then?’
‘It’s the threat of extermination.’
The room fell silent.
Edgeworth said, ‘Mikhail, if we’re of no importance to them, why are they signalling us?’
Ogorodnikov nodded grimly. ‘Precisely. You and I have been thinking the same thoughts. The signal may be a lure. If we reply, they have a measure of our state of scientific literacy.’
‘And are we still thinking the same thought, Mikhail? That if we reply, the next message from them might be our obliteration?’
Ogorodnikov clasped his hands together on the table. He nodded.
Velikhov interrupted in English. ‘That is nonsense. I am sorry but I must protest. We are ants. We pose no conceivable threat to them. An advanced civilisation will long have climbed out of the mire of barbarism and warfare.’
Ogorodnikov spoke sharply. The FO man translated verbatim: ‘You are here as a scientific adviser, not a policymaker.’
Velikhov ignored the rebuke. His voice was animated. ‘Advanced societies will be altruistic. They are simply trying to contact young technological societies such as our own. They judge that we have reached a stage where we can be helped. Look at the information they have sent us already.’
Edgeworth said, ‘We may be no threat now. When better to stop us, before we become one?’
There was an edge to Ogorodnikov’s smile. ‘A lure. A delicious bait. Perhaps the extermination requires no death rays on their part.’ He turned to Edgeworth. ‘The English have an author, Mary Shelley.’
‘Had. She’s a nineteenth-century figure.’
‘She created the Frankenstein monster.’
‘Yes.’ Ogorodnikov’s translator imitated the caution in Edgeworth’s voice.
‘We are being invited, are we not, to turn ourselves into monsters, for an unknown purpose, with a molecular code supplied to us by creatures about which we know nothing. What is this, Prime Minister, but a modern Frankenstein story?’
Velikhov interrupted his boss. ‘Forgive me, President, but as your scientific adviser I must protest against such nonsense. Improving our minds and bodies doesn’t turn us into monsters, it lifts us out of barbarism.’