Insistence of Vision (26 page)

“You mean that’s why –”

“– so that’s who they’ve come to kill.”

“So it’s all a mistake! What if we explain these are innocent people. Space fans. Sci fi readers. They aren’t responsible!”

“Then who
is
responsible, Professor? Who sent
Spirit?
Who sent
Opportunity
, and caused the death of fifty demigods?”

“Why, NASA did.”

“With funds provided by – and representing –”

“Representing? Why, the people of the United States of Am....” Her voice trailed off.

This time, the silence stretched on and on. Finally, I turned away. Accompanied by two guards, I retraced my steps, back to the jail cell and my thoughts.

ᚖ

I won’t stay here, of course. They can’t hold me.

Things are moving fast and decisions will be made.

Perhaps they’ll be pragmatic, as the Japanese were during the Meiji era, doing whatever it took to catch up with the West as quickly, systematically, and cold-bloodedly as possible. The logic is impeccable, after all. If those on the MER List are doomed anyway, perhaps we can get a best possible deal by doling them out to the aliens slowly, one by one, in exchange for information.

Buying lessons that we need to survive.

Or maybe our leaders will embrace the other course – one praised in legend and film. The noble path taken by so many of our ancestors when they faced similar choices – to go down fighting. Defending our customs and ways. Our fellow citizens. The innocent. Whatever the cost.

There are good arguments for choosing either course. Though judging from those people in the Committee Chamber, I’ll bet on nobility winning over pragmatism.

How ironic that movies nearly always depict generals and statesmen as cold-blooded. Viciously practical. Perfect villains. But everyone in that room had been
raised
by the same films and legends. Underneath our modern-cynical gloss, most of us are romantics. Generous. Courageous. Capable of great sacrifice for other members of the tribe.

I admire it. Of course. I’m built the same way.

My
sacrifice was to disagree. To make sure the other option was available. Maybe they’ll realize it soon.

Anyway. I’m glad it’s not my call.

ᚖ

Ponder, what question would be worth a life to get answered? Would a Martian answer this one?

“If there are other intelligences than our two races, how might I make contact with the
next
closest race of imperfect beings that might actually become friendly to humans and help us?”

ᚖ

Oh, the Martians aren’t stupid. They operate under different assumptions, true. But soon – especially if we fight – they’ll start to grasp how revoltingly gregarious humans really are. They’ll figure out that ‘laws’ and ‘nations’ aren’t just words that stand for temporary group-contracts, but powerful chains of obligation. Bonds that penetrate our tissue, bone and sinew.

Nor will it stop at the American border. Twenty nations contributed instruments to MER. And when you get down to sub-components...

Will
any
of us survive, once they realize that
all
of us are responsible?

As dark night settles through the narrow window of my cell, I squint at shadows, trying for analogies – the straws that a human mind clutches, when trying to fathom the strange. These Martians are like bears, I figure. Powerful, autonomous... needing little from each other or the environment... coming together only for special transactions, like mating. Ultimate libertarians. Damn.

From their perspective we’re like ants, almost hive beings. An unpleasant image for one like me, raised to treasure individuality.

I envy
and
pity them. No perfect Martian will ever face the conflicts that roil me now. The regrets. Or the poignant satisfaction, knowing I’ll be forgiven.

Somebody had to do what I did. Be the required Judas. Offer a second option, whether or not it’s chosen. The bitter, pragmatic way.

It could only be someone with a number like mine – one hundred and twelve on the list.

ᚖ

Awaiting my turn, I keep hoping one thing.

Get a good price for me.

No handful of beads. Make it something exciting, useful and interesting, like so many of us yearned to see from the space program. The reason we pooled so much human talent and enthusiasm, reaching for those lights that our imperfect eyes and caveman brains could barely make out, twinkling overhead.

If my death – and several million more – will bring us closer to the stars, well okay. I don’t lament signing my name to a roll call of dreamers.

When our human descendants get ‘optimized’, will we turn our backs to the sky, as the Martians have? No way. We won’t abandon curiosity. Or each other.

I hope.

Can’t rest or sleep. I keep looking up, each time there’s a noise beyond the dark window. Waiting for my own monster to come in its patient way, with the appearance – and godlike persistence – of some ageless, avenging angel. Come to spread its dark wings over me and collect my small value in vengeance, before moving on.

No battle this time. They won’t try hard to save me – the soldiers, scientists and politicians charged with protecting humanity’s future. Whichever course they choose – pragmatism or noble resistance – few will mourn my turn, I guess.

No matter.

Just get a good price for me.

Make it something cool.

Story Notes

This creepy “campfire story” was begun the very night that Mars passed closest to Earth in 50,000 years – during the October 2003 ‘planetary opposition.’ It is too late to remove names or add them to MER. But this author invites you, if you dare, to join him in signing on to have your names enrolled aboard the
next
space probe. Take part by joining The Planetary Society at
http://planetary.org

Next comes a little what-if tale about history and destiny. A contemplative piece that ponders whether (or not) a single individual can make a real difference.

A Professor at Harvard

ᚖ

Dear Lilly,

This transcription may be a bit rough. I’m dashing it off quickly for reasons that should soon be obvious.

Exciting news! Still, let me ask that you please don’t speak of this, or let it leak till I’ve had a chance to put my findings in a more academic format.

Since May of 2015, I’ve been engaged to catalogue the Thomas Kuiper Collection, which Harvard acquired in that notorious bidding war a couple of years ago, on eBay. The acclaimed astronomer-philosopher had been amassing trunkloads of documents from the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries – individually and in batches – with no apparent pattern, rhyme or reason. Accounts of the Dutch Revolution. Letters from Johannes Kepler. Sailing manifests of ports in southern England. Ledgers and correspondence from the Italian Inquisition. Early documents of Massachusetts Bay Colony and narratives about the establishment of Harvard College.

The last category was what most interested the trustees, so I got to work separating them from the apparent clutter. That is, it
seemed
clutter, an unrelated jumble... till intriguing patterns began to emerge.

Let me trace the story as was revealed to me, in bits and pieces. It begins with the apprenticeship of a young English boy named Henry Stephens.

ᚖ

Henry was born to a family of petit-gentry farmers in Kent, during the year 1595. According to parish records, his birth merited noting as
mirabilis
– he was premature and should have died of the typhus that claimed his mother. But somehow the infant survived.

He arrived during a time of turmoil. Parliament had passed a law that anyone who questioned the Queen’s religious supremacy, or persistently absented himself from Anglican services, should be imprisoned or banished from the country, never to return on pain of death. Henry’s father was a leader among the “puritan” dissenters in one of England’s least tolerant counties. Hence, the family was soon hurrying off to exile, departing by ship for the Dutch city of Leiden.

Leiden, you’ll recall, was already renowned for its brave resistance to the Spanish army of Philip II. As a reward, Prince William of Orange and the Dutch parliament gave the city a choice: freedom from taxes for a hundred years, or the right to establish a university. Leiden chose a university.

Here the Stephens family joined a growing expatriate community – English dissenters, French Huguenots, Jews and others thronging into the cities of Middelburg, Leiden, and Amsterdam. Under the Union of Utrecht, Holland was the first nation to explicitly respect individual political and religious liberty and to recognize the sovereignty of the people, rather than the monarch. (Both the American and French Revolutions specifically referred to this precedent).

Henry was apparently a bright young fellow. Not only did he adjust quickly – growing up multilingual in English, Dutch and Latin – but he showed an early flair for practical arts like smithing and surveying.

The latter profession grew especially prominent as the Dutch transformed their landscape, sculpting it with dikes and levees, claiming vast acreage from the sea. Overcoming resistance from his traditionalist father, Henry managed to get himself apprenticed to the greatest surveyor of the time, Willebrord Snel van Leeuwen – or Snellius. In that position, Henry would have been involved in a geodetic mapping of Holland – the first great project using triangulation to establish firm lines of location and orientation – applying methods still in use today.

While working for Snellius, Henry apparently audited some courses offered by Willebrord’s father – Professor Rudolphus Snellius – at the University of Leiden. Rudolphus lectured on “Planetarum Theorica et Euclidis Elementa” and evidently was a follower of Copernicus. Meanwhile the son – also authorized to teach astronomy – specialized in the Almagest of Ptolemeus!

The Kuiper Collection contains a lovely little notebook, written in a fine hand – though in rather vulgar Latin – wherein Henry Stephens describes the ongoing intellectual dispute between those two famous Dutch scholars, Snellius elder and younger. Witnessing this intellectual tussle first-hand must have been a treat for Henry, who would have known how few opportunities there were for open discourse in the world beyond Leiden.

ᚖ

But things were just getting interesting. For at the very same moment that a teenage apprentice was tracking amiable family quarrels over heliocentric versus geocentric astronomies, some nearby Dutchman was busy crafting the world’s first telescope.

The actual inventor is unknown – secrecy was a bad habit practiced by many innovators of that time. Till now, the earliest mention was in September 1608, when a man ‘from the low countries’ offered a telescope for sale at the annual Frankfurt fair. It had a convex and a concave lens, offering a magnification of seven. So I felt a rising sense of interest when I read Henry’s excited account of the news, dated six months earlier (!) offering some clues that scholars may find worth pursuing.

Later though. Not today. For you see, I left that trail just as soon as
another
grew apparent. One far more exciting.

Here’s a hint: word of the new instrument, flying across Europe by personal letter, soon reached a certain person in northern Italy. Someone who, from description alone, was able to re-invent the telescope and put it to exceptionally good use.

Yes, I’m referring to the Sage of Pisa. Big
G
himself! And soon the whole continent was abuzz about his great discoveries – the moons of Jupiter, lunar mountains, the phases of Venus and so on. Naturally, all of this excited old Rudolphus, while poor grumpy Willebrord muttered that it seemed presumptuous to draw cosmological conclusions from such evidence. Both Snellius patris and filio agreed, however, that it would be a good idea to send a representative south, as quickly as possible, to learn first hand about any improvements in telescope design that could aid the practical art of surveying.

ᚖ

So it was that in the year 1612, at age seventeen, young Henry Stephens of Kent headed off to Italy...

...and there the documented story stops for a few years. From peripheral evidence – bank records and such – it would appear that small amounts were sent to Pisa from Snel family accounts in the form of a ‘stipend’. Nothing large or well-attributed, but a steady stream that lasted until about 1616, when “H. Stefuns” abruptly reappears in the employment ledger of Willebrord the surveyor.

What was Henry up to all that time? One might squint and imagine him counting pulse-beats in order to help time a pendulum’s sway. Or using his keen surveyor’s eye to track a ball’s descent along an inclined plane. Did he help to sketch Saturn’s rings? Might
his
hands have dropped two weights – heavy and light – over the rail of a leaning tower, while the master physicist stood watching below?

There is no way to tell. Not even from documents in the Kuiper Compilation.

There
is,
however, another item from this period that Kuiper missed, but that I found in a scan of Vatican archives. An early letter from the Italian scientist Evangelista Torricelli to someone he calls “Uncle Henri” – whom he apparently met as a child around 1614. Oblique references are enticing. Was this “Henri” the same man with whom Torricelli would have later adventures?

Alas, the letter has passed through so many collectors’ hands over the years that its provenance is unclear. We must wait some time for Torricelli to enter our story in a provable or decisive way.

ᚖ

Meanwhile, back to Henry Stephens. After his return to Leiden in 1616, there is little of significance for several years. His name appears regularly in account ledgers. Also on survey maps, now signing on his own behalf as people begin to rely ever-more on the geodetic arts he helped develop. Willibrord Snellius was by now hauling in f600 per annum and Journeyman Henry apparently earned his share.

Oh, a name very similar to Henry’s can be found on the rolls of the Leiden Society, a philosophical club with highly distinguished membership. The spelling is slightly different, but people were lackadaisical about such things in those days. Anyway, it’s a good guess that Henry kept up his interest in science, paying keen attention to new developments.

Then, abruptly, his world changed again.

ᚖ

Conditions had grown worse for dissenters back in England. Henry’s father, having returned home to press for concessions from James I, was rewarded with imprisonment. Finally, the King offered a deal: amnesty in exchange for a new and extreme form of exile – participation in a fresh attempt to settle an English colony in the New World.

Of course everyone knows about the
Pilgrims
, their reasons for fleeing England and setting forth on the Mayflower, imagining that they were bound for Virginia, though by chicanery and mischance they wound up instead along the New England coast above Cape Cod. All of that is standard catechism in American History One-A, offering a mythic basis for our Thanksgiving Holiday. And much of it is just plain wrong.

For one thing, the Mayflower did not first set forth from Plymouth, England. It only stopped there briefly to take on a few more colonists and supplies, having actually begun its voyage in Holland. The expatriate community was the true source of people and material.

And right there, listed among the ship’s complement, having obediently joined his father and family, you will find a stalwart young man of twenty-five – Henry Stephens.

ᚖ

Again, details are sketchy. After a rigorous crossing oft portrayed in book and film, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on December 21, 1620.

Professor Kuiper hunted among colonial records and found occasional glimpses of our hero. Apparently he survived that terrible first winter and did more than his share to help the young colony endure. Relations with the local natives were crucial and Professor Kuiper scribbled a number of notes which I hope to follow-up on later. One of them suggests that Henry went west for some time to live among the Mohegan and other tribes, exploring great distances, making drawings and collecting samples of flora and fauna.

If so, we may have finally discovered the name of the “American friend” who supplied William Harvey with his famous New World Collection, the core element upon which Edmond Halley later began sketching his Theory of Evolution!

Henry’s first provable reappearance in the record comes in 1625, with his marriage to Prosper White-Moon Forest – a name that provokes interesting speculation. There is no way to verify that his wife was a Native American woman, though subsequent township entries show eight children, only one of whom appears to have died young – apparently a happy and productive family for the time. Certainly any bias or hostility toward Prosper must have been quelled by respect. Her name is noted prominently among those who succored the sick during the pestilence year of 1627.

Further evidence of local esteem came in 1629 when Henry was engaged by the new Massachusetts Bay Colony as official surveyor. This led to what was heretofore his principal claim for historical notice, as the architect who laid down the basic plan for Boston Town. A plan that included innovative arterial and peripheral lanes, looking far beyond the town’s rude origins. As you may know, it became a model for future urban design that would be called the New England Style.

This rapid success might have led Henry directly to a position of great stature in the growing colony, had not events brought his tenure to an abrupt end in 1631. That was the year, you’ll recall, when
Roger Williams
stirred up a hornet’s nest in the Bay Colony, by advocating unlimited religious tolerance – even for Catholics, Jews and infidels.

Forced temporarily to flee Boston, Williams and his adherents established a flourishing new colony in Rhode Island – before returning to Boston in triumph in 1634. And yes, the first township of this new colony, this center of tolerance, was surveyed and laid out by you-know-who.

ᚖ

It’s here that things take a decidedly odd turn.

Odd? That doesn’t half describe how I felt when I began to realize what happened next. Lilly, I have barely slept for the last week! Instead I popped pills and wore electrodes in order to concentrate as a skein of connections began taking shape.

For example, I had simply assumed that Professor Kuiper’s hoard was so
eclectic
because of an obsessive interest in a certain period of time – nothing more. He seemed to have grabbed things randomly! So many documents, with so little connecting tissue between them.

Take the rare and valuable first edition that many consider the centerpiece of his collection – a rather beaten but still beautiful copy of “Dialogho Sopra I Due Massimi Sistemi Del Mondo” or “A Dialogue Concerning Two Systems Of The World.”

(This document alone helped drive the aBay bidding war, which Harvard eventually topped because the Collection also contained many papers of local interest.)

A copy of the
Dialogue!
I felt awed just touching it with gloved hands. Did any other book do more to propel the birth of modern science? The debate between the Copernican and Ptolemaic astronomical systems reached its zenith within this publication, sparking a frenzy of reaction – not all of it favorable! Responding to this implicit challenge, the Papal Palace and the Inquisition were so severe that most of Italy’s finest researchers emigrated during the decade that followed, many of them settling in Leiden and Amsterdam.

That included young Evangelista Torricelli, who by 1631 was already well-known as a rising star of physical science. Settling in Holland, Torricelli commenced rubbing elbows with friends of his “Uncle Henri” and performing experiments that would lead to invention of the barometer.

In correspondence that year, Torricelli shows deep worry about his old master, back in Pisa. Often he would use code words and initials. Obscurity was a form of protective covering in those days and he did not want to get the old man in even worse trouble. It would do no good for “G” to be seen as a martyr or
cause c
é
l
è
bre
in Protestant lands up north. That might only antagonize the Inquisition even further.