The galaxies were unimaginably distant, their violent, slow-motion collision unleashing equally unfathomable energies. Millions of years later, the tiniest fraction of that energy streamed past Earth. Ironically, after traveling so incredibly far, the X-rays produced by that intergalactic encounter were absorbed by Earth's thin skin of atmosphere.
"Your request surprised me, my friend." Sergei Denisovich Arbatov stood beside Kyle in the cluttered astronomic-studies lab at the University of Helsinki. Sergei's hairline had receded shockingly in a few months' time. Could stress do that? Some things hadn't changed: the twinkle in the Muscovite's eyes and, despite the onset of winter, his trademark deep tan. "NASA has several instruments capable of observing the object you selected. Your failure to comment why I would be interested also intrigued me." The personal delivery by the American ambassador of Kyle's letter might also have engendered some curiosity.
There was a time when research satellites were operated by large teams of technicians from gleaming control rooms arrayed with phalanxes of consoles. Such extravagance for mission control now applied mostly to manned space flights—of which there were none, with the shuttle fleet grounded and the Russians broke—and bad sci-fi movies. An entry-level workstation with Internet access to a steerable antenna sufficed. The PC on the dented wooden lab bench was, just barely, adequate.
Tarja Nurmi, the instrument controller there to assist them, half sat, half leaned on the lab stool in front of that PC. Her back was to Kyle and Sergei. Her tattered and too-large sweatshirt was incongruously emblazoned with a Virginia Tech seal. Her pale blond hair, common enough in this corner of the world, brought Andrew Wheaton guiltily to mind. The grim confirmation Kyle could provide—that the site of his family's disappearance had seen an alien landing—would do Wheaton little obvious good, while possibly endangering Earth's underground resistance.
Focus, Kyle directed himself sternly.
The names the young astrophysicist had been given for her visitors were aliases. If she wondered why, in a world possessed of a ubiquitous Internet, those guests insisted on observing in person, she made no comment. Language differences didn't stop her—she and the Russian and French coprincipal investigators for whom she usually toiled all communicated in English. Those co-PIs were ticked off and several time zones distant, fuming at the unexplained preemption by Rosaviacosmos of their long-scheduled viewings. Sergei, as science advisor to President Chernykov, had arranged the retasking of the Russian space agency's orbiting X-ray observatory.
Surely the Russian had analyzed Kyle's unexpected request before doing so. The American briefly inclined his head toward the Tarja's back. I must be discreet. "Yes, we have X-ray instruments in orbit. None has this exact viewing angle just now." The need to use a Russian satellite was actually fortunate. It should make Sergei much less likely to question what—Kyle fervently hoped—they would soon see. He was not about to verbalize why exactly now was so important, or that the biggest supercomputer at Franklin Ridge had number-crunched for days to identify this not-soon-to-be-repeated opportunity. "Are we ready, Tarja?"
"We're locked on now." With casual grace, she moused open a new window. A scatterplot popped onto the PC monitor, colored dots richly strewn across a black background, the many hues representing X-ray frequencies invisible to the human eye. The small blinking square at the window's exact center enclosed the blazing dot that was tonight's target. In the lower-right corner, a frequency-vs.-energy histogram summarized the radiation from the crashing galaxies. In the lower left, a real-time clock counted in milliseconds.
A large circle dominated one side of the window, part glowing crescent and the rest a lightlessness interrupted by a faint dusting of pinpoints. "The big disk is the moon, of course." The young Finn tapped the screen. "The crescent is what Earth sees right now of the sun-facing side. We're seeing directly reflected solar X-rays. What appears to be the dark side of the moon is blockage by the moon of the sky's X-ray background."
Sergei frowned. "Why are there any spots on the dark side?"
Tarja yawned and stretched before answering. Fair enough: it was 2:37 a.m. by local time. "Sorry. Those stray dots on the dark side come from the scattering of solar X-rays from all around the solar system. Reflections from planets and asteroids."
"Will the clock stay on-screen if you zoom in?" asked Kyle.
"It can." She yawned again. "Sorry." She keyed a new scale factor and the window was redrawn. The targeting square and the dot it encompassed lay near the dark edge of the moon.
Kyle crouched over Tarja's shoulder. The clock display, reading out in Coordinated Universal Time, was scarcely a minute from the instant he'd memorized. Forbidding himself to blink, he watched the dot creep closer and closer to the moon. A side of the targeting box kissed the limb of the moon, slid over the moon. Sergei, on his right, exhaled sharply seconds later as the multigalactic dot abruptly winked out, eclipsed by the moon.
"Get what you needed?" Stifling yet another yawn, she handed them diskettes containing the session's observational data.
Before the American could overcome his own sympathetic yawn, Sergei replied. "Yes, my young friend. We have." Tapping Kyle on the shoulder, the Russian added, "Perhaps it would be best if we took a walk."
The campus grounds were dark, deserted, and bitterly cold. The deserted aspect of those circumstances was good. "Interesting that you answered Tarja for me, Sergei." Kyle's breath hung in front of him.
Sergei hunched his shoulders against an icy gust. "You were very specific as to when a fairly unremarkable astronomical object must be observed. Such insistence, it makes one ponder."
The stars sparkled like diamonds. The crescent moon they had so recently "seen" by its X-ray reflection shone down with a cold white light. "Were your musings rewarded?"
"I had to wonder, as perhaps young Tarja would, were she more awake, why one would schedule an observation certain to be interrupted. Could it be, I asked myself, that I'm not here to see what my friend said he wanted to show me?" An eddy of snow swirled past them. "Was it only a coincidence that you wanted to look so near to the moon?"
"Go on." Did Sergei really know, or was he bluffing?
"There is something important in the vicinity of the moon."
Kyle scrunched his neck, in a vain attempt to shelter more of his face and head within his upturned collar. And he'd thought Minnesota was cold.
"Exactly on schedule, the edge of the moon hid our celestial X-ray source. But that eclipse was not what you brought me to see, was it?" Sergei grasped Kyle's coat sleeve. "More interesting, I think, is that our observation went uninterrupted until the moon blocked our view.
"It is time, tovarich, to explain why you expected the Galactic mother ship to be transparent to X-rays." The glaring political incorrectness of that Soviet "comrade" showed just how overwrought Sergei was. "And does such transparency mean, as I believe, that there is no mother ship?"