Anomaly (22 page)

“You're kidding? Right?” asked Cathy.

“No,” replied Teller. “I'm quite serious. After all, what are kids but someone learning about our world afresh? I think if we look at the anomaly like that, we might be able to simplify our approach and move things along.”

“You sure are weird,” said Cathy.

It took almost four hours before the Navy SEALs were ready to go. Although reports of violence within the city had subsided with the National Guard out on the streets in force, the SEALs weren't taking any chances. They arranged a convoy of three Hummers. The SEALs welded what looked like a cow-catcher on the front of the lead vehicle; a series of pipes had been welded into a V-shape so as to form a slanted, plow-like structure stretching across in front of the Hummer radiator. One of the SEALs explained it was intended to break down barricades and push aside any disabled vehicles. The rear vehicle had a 60mm machine gun mounted on the roof. What had started out as a casual outing had turned into a major military exercise.

Anderson, Cathy and Teller sat in the middle vehicle, while armed troops rode along outside their Hummer, standing on the sideboards and holding on to the roof. The convoy barely broke 25 miles an hour as it drove down East 47
^th
street bristling with armament. These few blocks looked like a ghost town. There were no pedestrians, no traffic. The streets had been cleared by the New York Police Department. Squad cars blocked off the intersections, giving them a clear run to the mall. People peered nervously out of their apartment windows, curious as the convoy rolled slowly past.

“Lady Gaga doesn't get this kind of treatment,” Cathy noted as they pulled up outside the mall. Teller was feeling more and more stupid with each passing moment. Nothing was ever simple. It should have been, but at each point the sense of overkill dismayed him.

“So much for blending in with the shoppers,” said Anderson.

“I didn't mean for everyone to go to such efforts,” said Teller. “This was supposed to be something easy to do during our downtime.”

“You had better find something of value in there,” said Cathy sternly. “If they find out all you wanted was a doughnut it'll be the Navy SEALs starting the next riot.”

Anderson laughed. “She's right, you know.”

The sight of armed SEALs walking around inside the mall, their fingers poised over the trigger of their M16 machine guns, was unsettling to the shoppers, especially those with children, although the kids didn't seem to mind. The soldiers were friendly enough, but the stark reality of their presence was upsetting. Teller asked the sergeant to have his troops shoulder their weapons and wait outside the department store on the second floor. The sergeant said he wasn't supposed to let the group out of his sight. Teller assured him that if they ran into any trouble in the toy department there were plenty of Nerf guns. He told him they'd be able to hold their own until reinforcements arrived. The sergeant laughed and waited by the main entrance. The store manager had served in the Marines, so he brought out a case of Pepsi for the soldiers. Nobody complained.

“Funny that,” said Cathy, as they walked inside the store. “No one else wants to come in here while there's an armed guard outside. You'd think they'd feel safer.”

“Would you?” asked Anderson.

“I guess not,” said Cathy.

Teller headed for the toy department. His mind was already kicking into overdrive, thinking about the possibilities, looking for fresh ideas.

“So, what are we looking for?” asked Cathy, grabbing a shopping cart and heading off after him.

“This,” said Teller, picking up a packet of 64 colored felt-tip pens.

“Would you like a coloring-in book to go with that?” she asked. “Perhaps some crayons as well?”

“Oh,” said Anderson, ignoring Cathy. “I see where you're going with this.”

Cathy screwed her face up a little.

“It's a spectrum,” said Teller. “Look at the way the colors slowly vary from red to blue.”

“So?” replied Cathy.

“It's a sample, a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Anderson, instinctively picking up on Teller's point. “The entire spectrum is incredibly vast. There are radio waves that span several kilometers in length, while visible light is squeezed into a narrow band between 380 and 700 nanometers. X-rays and gamma rays are even smaller again. The orders of magnitude that lie on the spectrum would make it difficult for any alien species to know quite what we see, or if we see anything at all.”

Anderson was rolling his hand, mimicking a wave, trying to help her picture what he was describing.

“OK,” she said. “I know I'm going to regret asking this, but, what is a nanometer? Other than ridiculously small?”

Teller opened his palm, gesturing toward Dr. Anderson. Teller had a fair idea, but wasn't exactly sure, and didn't want to mess it up. He felt a bit of pressure to be precise, but the reality was, he was more instinctive in his thinking than someone like Anderson with his decades of scientific experience. And Teller felt a little intimidated by that, realizing he was a bit of a citizen scientist, full of ideas, but lacking any real depth.

Anderson picked a bag of marbles out of a display stand. He held them up, saying, “A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. If we use the Earth as a point of comparison, it would take roughly a billion marbles laid end-to-end to circle the planet. Imagine trying to see that line from outer space. You see, a nanometer is so small as to be invisible to us.”

“And it brings up an interesting point,” said Teller. “We live in moderation. And I don't mean in terms of economics or anything like that. Our experiences are all limited, being extremely narrow and restricted. We don't see things that are super big or super small, super fast, super hot or super cold. Everything about life on Earth is moderate by comparison with the universe at large.”

Cathy listened intently, intrigued by the concept.

“The smallest thing we can see is something like a strand of hair, and yet that's not small at all. It's at least a hundred thousand nanometers wide. We live in temperate, moderate climates. Our coldest day is nothing compared to how cold it gets in the shadows of the moon. We fly in a plane at hundreds of miles an hour and we think we're going fast, when our world is hurtling around the sun at almost seventy thousand miles an hour. We look at the sun and it seems tiny, yet it is over a million times bigger than Earth.

“We are so isolated and insulated from the reality of the cosmos around us. It's like we've lived our entire lives in a religious cloister and have never seen the world beyond our small courtyard.”

They were standing in front of an inflatable bouncy castle by the toy section. Neither the attendant nor any of the kids that would normally be swarming within were anywhere to be seen. A small electric pump whirred away, continually pushing air into the flimsy structure.

“If the Sun were the size of Earth, then Earth would be considerably smaller than a state like Pennsylvania,” said Teller. “And yet, our sun is tiny in comparison to other stars. But to us, stars are immaterial, almost irrelevant to daily life. They're just tiny sparks of light in the night sky, twinkling before our eyes like jewels.

“We have such a narrow band of experience, we don't realize just how limited it is in daily living. Our view of reality is so narrowly focused, so moderate in the scale of things, that it is entirely misleading. So when it comes to talking to our extraterrestrial friend, there's a good chance we'll miss anything he has to say if we don't make sure we're both on the same frequency.”

“He?” asked Cathy.

“She,” Teller conceded, grinning. “But you see my point. We need to establish a baseline, let them know what we can handle, what the limits are for our senses, while trying to understand the range in which they operate.”

“And a bunch of felt-pens is going to do that for you?” she asked. “Surely, NASA can do better than that.”

“Oh, yes,” replied Anderson. “But it's a good starting point for planning. It sets the upper and lower bounds of what we can see, it defines a set range.”

“We think we see all the light there is,” said Teller, “but we see only a fraction of the light that is emitted by a star like our sun. UV light, as an example, can burn you on a cloudy, overcast day, even though it doesn't seem that bright outside. We miss UV light entirely.”

“And here I was thinking you were buying a present for Susan,” joked Cathy.

Teller was too focused, talking himself through the logic. Whether Cathy or Anderson was there was irrelevant in that moment. Teller was talking to himself more than anyone else. It was a bad habit. His sister had chewed him out about it on more than one occasion. She told him he was especially prone to rambling during those long Thanksgiving afternoons, sitting around watching the Macy's parade. She'd call him a geek, but it wouldn't register. She'd toss grapes at him, or popcorn, and snap him out of his introverted focus. Cathy, though, was far too polite, so Teller continued.

“We communicate via our senses. When it comes to communicating with the anomaly, we need to show it what our senses are capable of detecting. A bunch of felt-pens is crude, but right here, in these sixty-four colors, you've got roughly the band of light we see every day.”

Cathy looked a little dubious.

“Think about bees and wasps,” said Anderson. “Consider how they see flowers glowing in ultra-violet, beyond anything we see. For all we know, the creatures that created the anomaly could be like them, seeing some other portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. A rainbow of colors like this will allow them to understand the limits applicable to us.”

“Are we certain our alien friends even have eyes?” asked Cathy.

“Oh, yes,” said Teller. “When the anomaly started to mimic its home world the atmosphere appeared like a shallow sea. Sight would be a crucial evolutionary development in such an environment.”

“Why?” she asked, not convinced.

“Well,” replied Anderson. “Evolutionary adaptation is all about exploiting opportunities. The cycle of day to night would give a distinct advantage to any creature that had even the most rudimentary sensitivity to light. It could have started with the most basic sensitivity to sunlight, like feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin as opposed to the cool of the evening, but as that distinction helped an animal forage or survive, it would slowly but surely become refined over numerous generations into a greater sensitivity to light. We've seen the same thing here on Earth, with over twenty different evolutionary paths converging on the formation of the eye.

“The day-night cycle conveys a specific advantage to sight, allowing animals to detect threats. Predators exploit changing light patterns, so to survive you need good eyesight to see them coming. Or if you're the hunter, you need good eyesight to catch your prey. Either way, that shallow sea is going to favor any organism with sight. And so, given time, you'll have eyes evolve, just like on Earth.”

“And to reach the stars,” Teller added, “you have to be able to see the stars. From those shallow seas, they would have had their curiosity peaked just as ours was when Galileo first watched moons in orbit around Jupiter. They must have some kind of sight, but it's probably on an entirely different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to ours.”

Cathy held the packet of coloring-in pens in her hand, looking at them as she spoke. “So they can see, but they can't necessarily see this? What colors would they see? Red but not green? Or something like that?”

“There is no red or green,” said Teller. “All the colors we see are artificial; they're constructs of the mind. This beautiful rainbow of colors you see here on these felt-pens is, in reality, different shades of gray.”

Cathy looked suspiciously at Teller.

“He's right,” said Anderson. “Color is artificial. Our minds evolved to interpret various frequencies of light as something more than shades because there was an advantage to detecting these subtle hues, but there is no red, no blue, no green, no yellow. Somewhat surprisingly, those that are color-blind see colors for what they really are, without their minds adding that little bit of extra pizzazz to the scene that cries out indigo or violet, red, yellow or blue.”

“I hate you guys,” said Cathy, with a smile on her face.

“What?” asked Teller, surprised.

“You take all the fun out of life.”

Teller laughed.

Anderson picked up a child's atlas.

“Yes, yes,” said Teller, looking over his shoulder at an image of North America, with the continent depicted as a swirling mass of green and brown blending together. The Rockies and the Appalachian mountain ranges were visible, as were the Sierras. On either side of the United States, lay the blue oceans of the Atlantic and the Pacific.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?” asked Anderson.

“I think so,” replied Teller. “This is a nice abstraction. It takes generalized colors, a generalized geographical shape, easily recognizable from orbit, and portrays three-dimensions scaled down into two. If they get it, they'll instinctively understand we use paper as a medium for communication. I like it.”

“Me too,” said Anderson, closing the book and tossing it in the shopping cart.

“I thought you said they couldn't see colors?” asked Cathy, a little confused.

“Oh,” replied Anderson. “They won't see colors as we do, but they'll recognize the wavelengths. And they'll be able to see how we simplify complex concepts, like the variety of colors in the oceans or on land, reducing them to just a few dominant shades, set in stark contrast to each other. They'll realize these distinctions are meaningful to us, and they'll understand why, because they describe the land mass we are on; a land mass they've seen from outer space.”

“But more importantly,” said Teller. “They'll begin to appreciate how we communicate with each other. How we transmit ideas and concepts from generation to generation.”

“These things are primers,” said Anderson. “They're signposts, appetizers, setting the direction for what's to come.”

Teller pulled a dictionary off the shelf. It was intended for children, probably from the ages of 10-12, with large print and broad coverage of common words. “Too much?” He asked.