The Thar Incident - 15

Continued from Part 14.

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The NSA had turned and walked out the door.

Dominic found himself staring at the door - Strategize with what?!... his mind raced. They had a whole lot of nothing ... in terms of information - there was blank sheet - who were the Aliens that the Americans made contact with? where did they come from? - how do you communicate with them? and how do you verify what they say... sure they tell you they are from planet X ... how do you verify something like that? ...

Dominic recalled the conversation he once had with a friend at during his engineering school days. At that time Dominic used to write the science fiction section of the student newspaper... and his friend who was training to be a physicist thought this was a ... well.... not an occupation for people of technical learning to do. After reading one of Dominic's pieces in the morning his friend had shouted out to him across the breakfast table in dorm... You know man ... this whole science fiction alien thing is total bullshit ... it all just human dramas set to the backdrop of space - even giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Issac Asimov ... its all about Humans meeting other Humans .... it is such shit... I mean, seriously, wanting to fuck someone from another culture is one thing but... from an another planet is a bit much. Forget travelling between planets - merely recieving a meaningful signal from another planet is pretty much impossible. The earth is a tiny speck in the sky - any signal emanating from any other point in the sky would expand radially outwards. The earth would capture only as much of the signal as its solid angle permitted it to - the farther source from earth - the less signal it would recieve... distinguishing it from background noise would impossible - even if you knew what the exact communication protocols used were. Without the protocol in hand... even if you recieved a signal you would be hard put to not dismiss it as noise... and over and above that we have the sun to deal with - I mean imagine the noise that makes - a giant fusion reactor a few hundred times the size of the planet itself that the spews off all manner of radiations ... ultimately there is no escaping the laws of physics... even in space.

Ultimately there is no escaping the laws of physics ... even in space. The phrase had stuck in Dominic's mind. As the years had gone - Dominic had often wondered, how many of these universal physical laws ... were really laws... or merely products of our own inability to measure things that voilated these laws..

It was only moments later that Dominic realised that Khalid and Amit were staring at him with the same intensity that he was staring at the door that the NSA had walked out of...

"Kya Dominic... kahan kho gaye..?" drawled Amit from the back of the room and even Khalid bore a curious look on his face.

Dominic turned towards Amit and spoke.. "Yaar, I was wondering, how do we verify anything the Aliens tell us?... for a moment ignore how they us.... but say they tell us something ... how do we know they are telling the truth. There has to be some verification mechanism."

Khalid cut in tersely.. " Sure.. but what can we verify... hamare pass toh spaceship etc.. nahi hain... - Tomorrow they say that we are from Orion... we can't go there and verify it.."

Dominic retorted "precisely... sure they say this is our spaceship it travels through interstellar space ... how do we verify that?"

Amit picked up a magazine on the table in front of him.. "So Dominic... since you have framed the question... I assume you have an answer too..?"

Dominic smiled and said ... "not exactly " ... " but assume for a moment the Aliens are real. The natural question then is ... how do they travel across space? - we can't do it - even if we chalk of things to biological differences - they must know things we don't."

Khalid cut in again .."Such as what?"

Dominic replied " Like laws of physics that we are unaware of... or atleast they should be able to tell us where our laws break down... "

Khalid and Amit eyed each other... "Laws of Physics? - you mean the crap they teach in high school? - those laws... those don't break down..." said Amit.

Dominic thought for a few seconds before he replied ..." Well... some laws have to breakdown... may be not conservation laws they teach in school ... but perhaps other held notions that may be specific the little bowl of space-time that we live in... must be wrong.. or at least only approximately true on the interstellar scale.."

Khalid and Amit both open up at once ... "What?!"

Dominic gave startled look before he realised what had happened ..."We have natural laws ... right? based on our observations of things... Sure we can measure things like energy and momentum and we can say ... yes these are conserved quantities and based on that notion we can explain a number of other phenomena we observe. and because of that ... we can make the claim... that the conservation of energy and momentum are... universal laws... However... the flip side... what we have not measured ... we cannot make laws for."

Dominic saw the puzzlement on their face .."so that is how we know they are real Aliens... we ask them to show us new and hitherto untested laws of nature"... he paused ... "Only when we independently test and verify the laws they inform us about - do we accept their claim as being genuine."

Amit began to look back at the magazine in his hand - "Sure if they give us time to do such a thing... we can do it.."

Khalid had also finally understood what Dominic was driving at - "Okay ... in principle that seems fine... since we have no real alternatives anyway.."

Khalid continued... "The more immediate problem is .."

Now Dominic cut in .. "that how do we talk to them in the first place... yes I know".

Amit quipped... "There is no air in space so they aren't going use voice .. so using normal linguistic tools is out..."

Dominic continued where he left off.. "Come to think of it - we are probably the same to them as the amoeba are to us... so my guess is that they would communicate with us in a similar fashion.. electrochemical signalling of some kind.."

Khalid looked at him.. "So how do we convince them not to kill us.."

Dominic stared quietly at Khalid and wondered ... why on earth had he left engineering school and gone into the business of killing people... such a lot of time wasted either killing someone or wondering about how someone was trying to kill him. Dominic imagined what his life would have been... a simpler life with a day job, a wife - some kids, a house in Bombay... a cup of tea in the morning, office at 9, a bit of oogling at the secretary, some flirting with interns, a lunch cooked by the wife, some timepass before afternoon tea and then a jarring ride in the local train to get home followed by mind numbing harassment from his kids... a much much simpler life.. no kill or be killed nonsense....

Amit spoke to break the uncomfortable silence.. " I agree with Khalid... this communication protocol is the most difficult thing ... if it some complicated electrochemical scheme they use... we may not be able to maintain security in our communications".

Khalid spoke .."but why assume it will be electrochemical.." That sparked off a retort from Dominic and then one from Amit... and it went on like that for hours.

The lengthening shadow of the peepal tree outside the house announced the arrival of the evening. This had been a long session, not that anyone was really keeping track of time. Dominic had done most of the talking, Amit and Khalid had just put in their two cents from time to time. They were all tired but they struggled on. The discussion kept going round and round the basic question, how to screen the information about previous contacts from this new one.

In reality the question was more complicated, no one knew what the Aliens were capable of doing to a single human being's psychology. It seemed plausible that the E.T.s might have some way of remotely tracking the production of stress related chemicals, or perhaps even of detecting changes in muscular tension in facial muscles. Alternatively it was possible that they might even have ways of dulling the neurological activity and induce a stupor of sorts. These techniques were currently in vogue among the intelligence communities of various countries as means of extracting useful information.

If the E.T.s got wind of the fact that the Indians were hiding something, they would focus their strengths on getting information out of the Indians, that was an unpleasant prospect. Alternatively if the Americans got wind of the fact that the Indians were hiding something they would be very keen to find out what the Indians knew and they would use all the means at their disposal to get the Indians to cough it out. With each iteration in the discussion, the risks seemed multiply.

Dominic was of the opinion that for the risk to be minimal, actual contact should be carried out by a team of people who had no knowledge of previous contacts. This way if they were captured or subject to some form of mental scanning, they would be disposable. Khalid and Amit initially disagreed as this would add unnecessary gaps into the process of contact but over time they came around to Dominic's point of view.

After another round of discussions it was decided that the communication with the contact team would be carried out in a screened fashion so that none of the team members would know the true identities of the controllers.

Another risk that surfaced in the discussions was the possibility of the contactees being infected with some form of subversive thought. A number of options were available for keeping track of subversive tendencies ranging from regular interviews to sensory deprivation. Whatever the exact choice of options, clearly a mechanism would have to be devised to continously check for the possibility of subversion.

It was at this point in the discussion Amit asked a question that had been bothering him for a very long time...

"What would these Aliens want from the Earth now? or ever? ..."

Dominic replied faster than anyone anticipated, "There are really three things - which are in abundance on this planet: liquid water, labour and ofcourse a replenishable supply of complex carbon-hydrogen compounds, abundant food if your diet is carbon based..."

Khalid cut in, " That doesn't make sense to me. Labour utilisation is possible only on the planet itself, preferably on a specific landmass - otherwise the cost of transporting this labour is too high. The same applies to water, yes we have plenty of it here but how do we get it off the planet? and so also for food. If their demands for either of these things were significant, we would notice this publicly... there must be something else they are after here..."

Dominic thought for a second "okay .. what about low abundance in general? Ozone, some rare earth stuff, heavy isotopes of lighter things -Deuterium, Tritium C-14? "

Khalid spurted out .. "but space will have much more of those..."

Dominic replied ," Maybe.. but it may be cheaper to extract it here"

Khalid stuck to his case .. "If they wanted it so badly - keeping it out of the public eye would have been hard..."

Dominic cut in "maybe they are mining it and we don't know about it because we don't see their activities - I mean we don't know what is going on underground or the seas or very high up in the sky.. so in theory .. at the very least we have a giant mount of molten iron and other magnetic materials and god-only-knows-what-else in the earth's core... if someone took some of that how would we know?"

"Great.. so we have no idea why they are here..." drawled Amit.

Dominic looked at him sourly..." I feel it has to be water... there is so much on this planet - if they were taking some away - we simply wouldn't notice.."

Khalid looked unconvinced - this was not going as planned... there were simply too many unknowns in situation.

Amit yawned... and that reminded Khalid that they hadn't had a meal in the entire day... he reached for the phone and called up some food.