VOYAGER
Outside the orbit of the farthest planet in the solar system, the effects of the sun are still present. A continuous stream of charged particles from the sun's magnetic field is swept by the solar wind and creates a huge bubble-like structure known as the heliosphere. From mankind's perspective it serves a most useful function by keeping the solar system relatively free of interstellar matter and slowing the entry of cosmic rays.
Voyager 2, intrepid visitor of four planets and fifty-seven moons during the past eighteen years, was only a third of the way to the edge of the heliosphere but well beyond the orbit of Pluto-a vast, empty hinterland where there is little for the probe's scanners to search out and examine. Indeed, most of the equipment on board the Voyager was turned off shortly after the probe passed Neptune in August of 1989. Since that time only the spectrometer-a device that detects ultraviolet radiation-has been kept active.
With its large dish oriented back into the plane of the planets and the high-gain antenna in the center centered on Earth, Voyager heads for the edge of the heliosphere, projected to reach it by the year 2000. The plutonium power on the probe is expected to run out in 2020. After that, it is estimated that it will take Voyager millions of years before it comes close to another star.
When Voyager was launched in 1977, there were people who believed shooting out into space what was essentially a guidebook back to Earth might not have been the most prudent idea. Those worries were overruled. After all, the scientists argued, the radio and television rays from Earth were much farther out already than Voyager would ever reach intact. Those rays not only pinpointed Earth's stellar location but also depicted life-and not a very flattering one, as a survey of the channels indicates-on Earth.
At precisely 0100, Greenwich mean time, the transmitter secreted away in the guts of the probe powered up and began pulsing out a binary code representing the readings from the spectrometer for the past twenty-four hours. The radio waves began their four-hour, ten-minute, twenty-three-second trip back to Earth to be gathered in at the deep-space communications center near Alice Springs, Australia, where a giant dish would grudgingly turn from higher priority missions to gather in Voyager's data during its fifteen minute daily allocation of dish time.
Seven minutes later-four and a half billion miles into its seventeen-year journey and midway through the transmission-Voyager 2's journey ended abruptly.
Hawkins felt the pounding of a massive headache behind his eyes. For the past several hours they had learned quite a bit about meteor-burst transmitting, Ayers Rock, digital encoding, and various other information, but it had added little to their understanding of the situation.
Mentally tuning out the headache, Hawkins slapped the end of his pointer on the surface of the easel. "All right, I know this seems rather simplistic, but bear with me. Basically we've got four items here."
NUCLEAR BLAST VREDEFORT DOME
VOYAGER INFORMATION
MESSAGE TO Five SITES (Including Vredefort Dome)
OUR NAMES
"I don't think you should have those arrows. None of those items necessarily follows from the previous one." Levy's quiet voice filled the room. "I would admit that the Voyager information was the step prior to the message, since that information was used in making up the message. But how did our names come up?"
Hawkins shrugged. "We'll get to that later. I'm more concerned about the connection with the bombing. There's one more of those nuclear weapons out there missing. If whoever is behind these messages is involved with the bombs, we need to find that out."
Hawkins didn't think they should talk about the touchstone theory in front of Lamb. Levy's point had been valid, but if it was true, there wasn't too much they could do about it. Besides, there were still several other factors that didn't quite fit into that theory-at least not that he could see. It was those other factors that they were examining now.
"Look at those reception sites and add in the Rock." Levy was holding up a world map with the six red circles. "What does the spatial layout make you think?"
"One for each inhabited continent," Hawkins noted. Something had been bugging him for a while. "What if the others were diversions?"
"What?" Fran looked puzzled.
"What if the only true message was sent to South Africa, but the other ones were sent to throw us off track?" Hawkins warmed to the theme. It was something he might have done. "We're sitting here looking at where those beams terminated, but that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be anything there. We have no record of transmissions from those sites."
"Or there might have been something there once upon a time and it no longer exists," Levy commented. "But getting back to the layout of the six sites: Let's stop being egocentric and turn our gaze outward. Note that three are in the northern hemisphere and three are in the southern. Note that each set of three is laid out in a pattern that splits the world into three roughly equal parts."
Lamb had entered while Hawkins was showing the diagram, and he now spoke for the first time. "If you wanted to set up monitors to cover the whole world you might space them out like that. Maybe the Russians put together some sort of monitoring system in the past and the explosion at Vredefort damaged it?"
Levy was shaking her head thoughtfully. "No. That's not what I'm talking about. Think about where we're sitting right now. Why is this tracking station here in Australia?"
"So we can always have contact with our satellites and probes when they're on the far side of the globe from the United States," Fran answered.
"Right," Levy said, and waited.
Fran was the first to catch on. "Wait a minute! Are you saying that these six sites are the same thing? Monitoring or relay sites to space? But there's nothing there at the other sites!"
"There was nothing in Ayers Rock that we knew of until it sent out the message," Hawkins noted.
Levy pointed back at Hawkins's diagram. "We all seem to be ignoring the fact that the message relayed the data off Voyager 2 with the addition of our names. Yet Voyager is almost out of the solar system. How could someone have gotten that information?"
"They don't necessarily have to have gotten it off the satellite itself," Batson replied. "That information is available in data bases here on Earth."
"So someone could have just used that Voyager information as a diversion," Lamb said.
Hawkins turned to Lamb. "When this crater woman gets here, we need to pump her for everything about Meteor Crater. I'm sure they've done sonar and electromagnetic resonance soundings in the crater. If not, we need to get some people out there. Maybe there's something in that area similar to what's in the Rock."
"Maybe." Lamb seemed bothered by Levy's quick dismissal of the Russian angle. "The Russians would have wanted to do something like that-set up sites around the world like we have. They could get access to the Voyager plate information-it's public information. Hell, maybe this thing in the Rock dates back to Sputnik"
"What exactly do you think you have in the Rock?" Batson asked. He thumped a folder down on the table in front of him. "I've been going through the data picked up so far and it seems to me that all you know for sure is that there is an anomaly on your sonar and electromagnetic resonance mapping. Nothing on sound. Nothing on radio waves since the one broadcast. All your sonar and EMR tells you is that there is something other than solid rock down about five hundred feet. And the latest data indicate that it is approximately forty feet in diameter and fifteen in depth."