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had one goal.
It had surprised Tom that that first Martian landing should have had such a
depressing effect on SETI
research, when any sensible interpretation of the Drake Equation had always
allowed for the fact that
Earth was the only planet likely to harbor life in this particular solar
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system. Even he was disappointed, though, when the Girouard probe finally put
the kibosh on any idea of life existing in what had once seemed like the
potentially warm and habitable waters of Jupiter's satellite Europa. Still,
the Principal of
Mediocrity, which is that this sun, this solar system, this planet, and even
the creatures which dwell upon it, are all common-or-garden variety phenomena,
and thus likely to be repeated in similar form all over the galaxy, remained
entirely undamaged by such discoveries, at least in Tom's mind. But in the
mind of the general public (in that the general public has a mind to care
about such things) and in the minds of the politicians and administrators who
controlled scientific funding (ditto), it was a turning point, and began to
confirm the idea that there really wasn't much out there in space apart from
an endless vacuum punctuated by a few aggregations of rocks, searing
temperatures, hostile chemicals.
Funnily enough, this recession of the tides in SETI funding worked in Tom's
favor. Like a collector of a type of object d'art which was suddenly no longer
fashionable, he was able to mop up the data, airtime and hardware of several
abandoned projects at bargain prices, sometimes using his own money, sometimes
by tapping the enthusiasm of the few remaining SETI-freaks, sometimes by
esoteric tricks of funding. Now that the big satellite telescopes could view
and analyze stars and their orbital perturbation with a previously unheard-of
accuracy, a few other solar systems had come out of the woodwork, but they
were astonishingly rare, and mostly seemed to consist either of swarms of
asteroids and dust clouds or huge near-stellar aggregations of matter which
would fuse and crush anything resembling organic life.
So in the Drake Equation the fraction of stars to likely have a planetary
system went down to f p
something like 0.0001, and  the number of those planets which could bear
life fell to the even lower n e
0.0000-somethings unless you happened to think that life was capable of
developing using a different chemical basis to carbon, as Tom, reared as he
was on a diet of incredible starbeasts, of course did.
f l
 the probability that life would then develop on a suitable planet also took a
downturn, thanks to lifeless Mars and dead Europa, and then as every other
potential niche in solar system that some hopeful scientist had posited was
probed and explored and spectrum analyzed out of existence. The stock of
SETI was as low as it had ever been, and Tom really didn't care. In fact, he
relished it.
He wrote a paper entitled "New Light On The Drake Equation," and submitted it
to
Nature, and then, as the last SETI journal had recently folded, to the
Radio Astronomy Bulletin and, without any more success, and with several
gratuitously sneering remarks from referees, to all the other obvious and then
the less obvious journals. In the paper, he analyzed each element of the
equation in turn, and explained why what had become accepted as the average
interpretation of it was in fact deeply pessimistic. Taking what he viewed as
the true middle course of balance and reason, and pausing only to take a few
telling swipes at the ridiculous idea that computer simulations could provide
serious data on the likelihood of life spontaneously developing, and thus on
he concluded that the final figure in the Drake Equation was, f, l
N
by any balanced interpretation, still in the region 1,000-10,000, and that it
was thus really only a matter of time before contact was made. That was, as
long as people were still listening &
He didn't add it to the versions of the paper he submitted, but he also
planned to ask whoever finally published the thing to place a dedication when
it was printed:
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For Terr.
That, at least, was the simplest variant of a text he spent many wall-staring
hours expanding, cutting, revising. But the paper never did get published,
although a much shortened work, stripped of its maths by Tom and then of a lot
of its sense by the copy editor, finally did come out in a popular science
comic, beside an article about a man who was growing a skein of his own nerve
tissue to a length of several hundred feet so that he could bungee-jump with
it from the Victoria Falls. Still, the response was good, even if many of the
people who contacted
Tom were of a kind he felt reluctant to give out his e-mail, let alone his
home, address to.
The years passed. Through a slow process of hard work, networking and
less-than-self-aggrandizement, Tom became Mr. SETI. There always was, he
tended to find, at least one member of the astronomy or the physics or even
the biology faculty of most institutes of learning who harbored a soft spot
for his topic. Just as Sally Normanton had done when he returned to Aston on
that autumn when the air had smelled cleaner and different and yet was in so
many ways the same, they found ways of getting him small amounts of funding.
Slowly, Tom was able to bow out of his other commitments, although he couldn't
help noticing how few attempts were made to dissuade him. Perhaps he'd lost
his youthful zest, perhaps it was the smell on his breath of whatever he'd
drank the night before, and which now seemed to carry over to the morning. He
was getting suprisingly near to retirement age, in any case. And the thought,
the ridiculous idea that he'd suddenly been on the planet for this long,
scared him, and he needed something which would carry him though the years
ahead. What scared him even more, though, like a lottery addict who's
terrified that their number will come up on exactly the week that they stop
buying the tickets, was what would happen to SETI if he stopped listening.
Sometimes, looking up at the night sky as the computers at whatever faculty he
was now at pounded their way through the small hours with his latest batch of
star data, gazing at those taunting pinpricks with all their mystery and
promise, he felt as if he was bearing the whole universe up by the effort of
his mind, and that the stars themselves would go out, just as they did in that
famous Clarke story, the moment he turned his back on them. It was about then
that he generally thought about having another drink, just to see him through
the night, just to keep up his spirits. It was no big deal. A drink was a
drink. Everyone he knew did it.
So Tom finally got sufficient funds and bluff together to set up his own
specialized SETI project, and then settled on France for reasons he couldn't
now quite remember, except that it was a place he hadn't been to where they
still spoke a language which wasn't English, and then chose the karst area of
the Massif
Central because it gave the sort of wide flat planes which fitted with the
technology of his tripwire receivers, and was high up and well away from the
radio babble of the cities. The choice was semi-symbolic as well as the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]