Power Challenges by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova [Bova, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

NEW EARTH FOUND BY LUNAR TEAM

Chicago Tribune

ARE ALIENS LIVING ON NEW EARTH?

National Enquirer

Senator Eugene McMasters sat at his desk in red-faced fury.

“So what do we do about this?” he demanded of the trio sitting in front of the desk, facing him.

His chief of staff shrugged minimally. Harold Newby was a gray-haired veteran of Washington politics, calm in the worst of storms. “Not much we can do, Chief. The news media’s nuts about the story.”

“But is it true? Not something Tomlinson’s people have cooked up?”

His public relations director shook her carefully coiffed head. “The Astronomical Association released the story,” Mavis Johnstone said softly, gently. “They wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t true.”

The third person facing McMasters was Oscar Edelman, the senator’s science advisor, a rail-thin man with lank, dirty-blond hair. He nodded his agreement. “They’ve found a planet that’s very similar to Earth. Whether it’s populated or not is not known.”

“How soon before that is known?” McMasters demanded.

Edelman shrugged his frail shoulders. “They’re programming several radio telescopes to listen for possible radio transmissions. And there’s talk of sending one or more unmanned spacecraft to study the planet close-up.”

McMasters seemed to vent steam.

Edelman explained quickly, “It’ll take fifty years for a spacecraft to reach Sirius. Possibly more.”

“So we won’t know if there’s people on that planet or not for at least fifty years,” the senator growled.

“Not unless the radio telescopes pick up something.”

“If they don’t, that means the planet’s dead?”

“Nosir. It just means that if there’s intelligent life on the planet, it hasn’t reached the level where it’s developed radio technology.”

“And we won’t know that for fifty years, at least.”

Squirming uncomfortably, Edelman replied. “Unless we pick up some radio signals.”

McMasters glared at him.

Edelman stopped squirming and pulled himself up straighter in his chair. “There’s something pretty doggone odd about this so-called New Earth,” he said.

“Odd?”

“It shouldn’t be there.”

Leaning forward in his sizeable desk chair, McMasters demanded, “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Sirius B is a white dwarf star,” Edelman began to explain, like a teacher drumming facts into a slow pupil. “Ages ago it was a normal star, but it collapsed and exploded. Like a supernova.”

“A super what?” McMasters demanded.

Ignoring the senator’s question, Edelman went on, “The star’s explosion would’ve probably destroyed any planets orbiting around it. Or at least scoured them clean, boiled off their atmospheres and oceans.”

“So?”

“So here’s this planet orbiting Sirius B. With an oxygen-rich atmosphere and large bodies of liquid water. By all we understand of stellar dynamics, it shouldn’t be there. It can’t be there.”

“But there it is,” said Charlene Martinson, in a near whisper.

Edelman nodded. “There it is,” he echoed.

Senator McMasters was not impressed. “So your highbrow theories are all wrong. The planet is sitting there, you can’t deny it.”

“No,” Edelman replied, his voice a little shaky. “I can’t deny it.”

And the third man sitting before the senator’s desk, Newby, quoted, “Another beautiful theoretical bubble burst on the sharp edge of an observed fact.”

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