The Exodus Read online

  As the students described it for themselves, the base was run like a military boot camp. Any movement outside the base perimeter was strictly regulated. Permissions for any works outside the base were personally authorized by Gromov, whom they called General Pinochet behind his back. And why wouldn’t they? This was so frustrating! They covered thousands of parsecs to get here and now they were just sitting in a sterile lab that was an exact replica of their institute lab!

  The only entertainment for them on this plane was looking down at the pale-yellow lakes emitting some grayish haze. And even then, the panoramic viewing platform was tightly sealed with a Plexiglas dome. Even though they knew with a hundred-percent certainty that the Hanimed’s atmosphere was not dangerous at all for the human body.

  At first, none of them paid attention to the new message about unusual new islands. Lazily sipping a berry drink synthesized in an Ultra-5 field military blender, the young people were again engaged in the conversation that they had hundreds of times before. It always came down to the power overreach, to illegal constraints on their civil rights and freedoms, the whimsy of the notorious base chief who believed he was the authority of the last instance, and their poorly used scientific potential, underestimated by their home research institute.

  When they started to talk, for the hundredth time, about the “idiotic rules” enforced on the base that had been written “by some paranoid maniacs at least three hundred years ago,” they all almost immediately had the same idea: paragraph 1-357-A. It literally said,

  “When a biological environment activity is registered on extraterrestrial objects, namely…[list]

  The team, group, or unit leadership, as well as the research bases of all types, except for [exclusions listed]…

  …must immediately include as an expert a military exobiologist or a civil exobiologist with a certificate of at least the third category…

  …in the absence of such, the responsibilities should be given to a military doctor or civilian medical personnel of at least the third category…”

  This excerpt from the Code of Space Navigation was drilled into freshmen of all colleges and universities that studied and researched extraterrestrial life forms. They all knew it like the Lord’s Prayer, and for the exobiologists it had the same meaning and force as the Hippocrates Oath for the medical personnel.

  Without any hesitation, the doctoral students went to the lower hanger, boarded the first glider they found, keyed in the coordinates, and went straight to the newly formed land mass. Perhaps, they thought that if they proved the presence of biological activity on the planet, they would be subject to paragraph 1-357-A and would make at least some contribution to humanity.

  Strangely enough, the young people were not alarmed by the fact that the islands that had appeared out of nowhere had the shape of perfect pentagons. The experts who later investigated the incident, after careful examination of the digital snapshots, only shrugged in bewilderment. Later it was established that the ratio of the pentagons’ areas was exactly the Pi number – 3,1415926535.

  On the base, they noticed the students’ disappearance only about three hours later. The entire base personnel spent some time searching for them on the base and studying the tapes of both the inside and outside security cameras. When the rescue drone arrived at the place where they supposedly landed, the pentagons had already been gone. There was nothing there. Only the bouillon was lazily boiling and the haze evaporating from its surface seemed a little denser.

  Two days later, the glider’s frame was found at about a hundred miles away from the site of the tragedy. It remained a mystery how it ended up there. Just as what really happened on that fateful day.

  The black box was never retrieved either. All the orbital probes at that time were recording other parts of the planet. The last recording from the tragedy site ended at 12:45 pm local time, i.e. about an hour before the estimated time of the students’ arrival. The recording was 2.5 minutes, and after that the probe moved to the other coordinates on the programmed route.

  A special commission to investigate the three students’ deaths was immediately appointed and arrived at Hanimed. It included Nick’s father, Roman Sobolev. He represented the Galactic Department of Emergency Situations (GDES). The exobiologists, as it was expected, were represented by Professor Perelman. He must have felt guilty about what happened as well, but he tried to hide it carefully. In any case, the professor controlled his emotions and managed to complete a number of brilliant research tests. Thanks to his professionalism and rare dedication they managed to at least partially figure out what had happened.

  It turned out that the microorganisms that lived in the Hanimed pseudo-lakes could organize themselves into coordinated colonies under certain circumstances. And these colonies were openly hostile and aggressive toward any external organics. Later, another group of researchers registered the same types of hostile reactions to a number of non-organic compounds as well.

  It was impossible to establish for sure which types of irritants were affecting the colonies that way. The experiment was being replicated many times with the same positive result, and then at some point suddenly became absolutely impossible to replicate. This was convincingly demonstrated by Professor Perelman after he lived next to the Petri Bouillon for a week or to be more exact, six days. In the morning of the seventh day, the exploration probes registered a strange movement on the shore, right next to his field alb. The professor was urgently evacuated by the group of fast responders. Right on time. In about twenty minutes, the pale-yellow bouillon was already boiling there.

  Perelman was removed from the investigation team, but the experiments he conducted in the field established that the self-organizing colonies were the most authentic replicators. When they came into contact with alien organisms, they were completely transforming them. As a result, the alien cells became completely identical to the cells of the aggressive colony. When this reaction took place, each observation registered the increase in the Bouillon temperature and excretion of a salty substance that reminded them of usual sea salty water. After rearranging the victim’s cells, the invader fell apart into separate microorganisms again. It should be noted that in the lab conditions, they failed to replicate these interactions either before or after they took place.

  And the second discovery: The microorganism colonies inside one and the same lake at times seemed to be at war with each other. They would attack each other most often when one of the microorganisms groups in the Bouillon would show the number of mutations caused by the external factors such as ultraviolet and ionic radiation, increased acidity in the environment and concentration of some metals, going over a certain limit (fluctuating from case to case) beyond which the irreversible change of the phenotype was inevitable.6 In that case, the larger colony of the microorganisms would activate itself and attack the mutating brethren.

  Based on these data, Perelman cautiously suggested that thanks to such a unique ability, the Hanimed microorganisms managed to stay practically unchanged in terms of their genetics over millions of years, which ran contrary to the universal belief that the evolution worked everywhere in Universe.

  Another group of researchers, Valstein analytic team, went even further in its research. The team looked at all video recordings of the planet’s surface that were made from the first day when Hanimed was discovered. Having processed petabites of information in a super-powerful computer, the analysts noticed another strange thing. The shoreline, the depth, and volume of the biomass of the lakes changed over time. At first they didn’t pay attention to this, writing it off to the natural change such as evaporation, precipitation, change in relief due to tectonic shifts, etc. But after they scrupulously studied and compared all the available data, the analysts made a sensational suggestion that the changes in the lakes may be artificial.

  Then they remembered about the doctoral students’ glider that had turned up almost a hundred miles away from the place of the tragedy, despite the abse
nce of any currents in the Petri Bouillon. They also remembered the strange pictures of the newly-formed land in the form of two perfect pentagons of different sized that had been transmitted by the mapping probe. Someone from the Valstein team thought of dividing the area of the larger island by the area of the smaller one. To everyone’s astonishment, the resulting number was Pi.7

  The entire human race, scattered around various places of the inhabited Universe, was following the news on Hanimed developments. And after a journalist asked Valstein at a press conference why he was so surprised that the pentagons’ areas ratio was equal to Pi, the fate of the distant Hanimed was under the close scrutiny of the World Council, and later under the sphere of its direct responsibility.

  At that fateful press conference, Valstein, who looked like a typical disheveled absent-minded professor, put his lips forward in a funny way, and said, “The Pi number is transcendental, and such numbers are incredibly difficult to deduce. Regular algebraic equations don’t work here. These numbers can be calculated by studying the process with its subsequent verification when the steps in the implemented process are increased…”

  Here he had to stop because he heard the audience make a quiet protesting sound. After the journalists politely reminded him that people attending the press conference were not his students and he was not delivering a lecture from his podium, the academic apologized and continued, “Pi number is a constant, a mathematical constant expressing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The diameter is always going to be smaller than the circumference by the same number, Pi. This rule works everywhere in our Universe. And it is understandable for any sentient being that is remotely familiar with geometry.”

  The audience let out a rustling laughter at that moment, but Valstein was unfazed and continued, “As we all understand, the civilizations developing independently of each other, separated by millions of light years, use various systems of measurement. For example, we, Earthlings, historically use the meter as the main unit of measurements for length, which is nothing but one forty millionth of our planet’s meridian. Here, of course, we can remember the ancient measurement of length – a foot. It was introduced by the English King Henry I, the youngest son of William the Conqueror, who ordered to use his own foot as a unit of measurement. Now, try to explain some sentient non-humanoid living in another Galaxy, on a planet that may be several times larger or smaller than the Earth, what the meter is. Not to mention the foot. It will all sound arbitrary to them. While the constants serve as the universal systems of measurement tied to neither the length of arms or feet of some whimsical monarch who ruled some country on Earth at some point in history nor the planet parameters, i.e. they are understandable to all sentient beings living in other Galaxies.”

  Valstein smiled humbly, as if apologizing for this necessary lecture, and started to smooth his disheveled hair. The audience was quiet, waiting. Finally, as if remembering something, the professor spoke again, “But this is not all. We connected all five angles of these two pentagons into the imagined circumference and also calculated the ratio of their length. It corresponded to another constant.”

  The scientist looked around the entire audience, as if looking for someone to guess. Without waiting for the answer, he concluded, “This was the Avogadro’s number!8 Well, of course without the exponentiation…”

  That was the first time when it was suggested that the pseudo-lakes were sentient. This caused a lot of arguments, of course. To be more exact, the debate was not over then. Due to its location, Hanimed was extremely attractive for the Earthlings. The stationary zero-tunnels were very close to it, making the travel and communication a lot easier. Not to mention that the planets like that, with ideal conditions for human life, could be counted on fingers in the entire known Universe.

  After long arguments and debates, the World Council decided to delay by a hundred years the terra-forming of the new planet.9 Hanimed was fenced off and the research base was moved from the planet to the stationary orbit. Even though the researchers failed to establish the sentience of pseudo-lakes with certainty even by the present time, the Council made this decision based on the Noimann-Barentsev principle, which said “When in doubt about non-sentience, err on the side of sentience.”

  Over time, the heated arguments about Hanimed calmed down. The Earthlings’ attention switched to other events, of which the Commonwealth, spread out for thousands of parsec, had many and more. Sometimes, new messages from the planet emerged in the general information flow. Nothing unusual, except, perhaps, just one thing. From time to time, some source communicated unverified information that on board of the Hanimed researches base the crew members came face to face with those same dead doctoral students.

  Even though he was just a kid at that time, Nick did not believe those tales. Until, that is, he eavesdropped by accident on his father’s conversation with Egor Stroev who happened to visit with them. Egor and Nick’s father were old friends, had served together in one GDES unit long before Nick was born. When the Hanimed terra-forming program was canned, Nick’s father was transferred back to the Earth while uncle Egor, as Nick called him as a child, stayed behind with a small group of first responders at the research base. Stroev’s responsibility was the base personnel security.

  The job, as he described it, was not difficult. All the samples of the planet’s biomass were collected by drones. Fine-tuning of the numerous express analyzers that were dispersed all over the planet’s surface was done most of the times remotely, without people’s participation. The life on the base was uneventful and routine. As far as Egor could tell from his private conversations with the scientists, they did not expect or even hoped for any significant breakthroughs in studying the pseudo-lakes phenomenon. And that was when the first rumors started to spread that some people on the base periodically saw the disappeared trinity of the doctoral students.

  Egor was a professional. Despite the absurdity of the messages he had been receiving, he conducted an internal investigation as the rules prescribed. There were no alien or strange objects in the area he was responsible for, just as he expected. But he did find a lot of objects lost at different times, starting with personal things and ending with valuable lab equipment.

  Those who previously insisted that they had seen the notorious trinity “with these very own eyes,” during the investigation and questioning refused to give their testimony on the record, which was understandable. The most common response to the follow-up questions was “the visibility was very low.” And some other similar interpretations: It was already getting dark; it was just dawning, still dark; I was coming back from the night shift; etc. Everything was coming down to one thing, “I must have thought I saw them, when it was just a mistake.” In a number of cases, the psychologist on board conducted brain and mind tests, which yielded no results either. Everyone was advised to exercise more, to swim and walk in the station’s park zones. And the base returned to its uneventful, routine life.

  When Stroev received an unplanned order to secure landing in the area of the planet’s south pole, he was even happy. Having made sure that the authorizing document had been signed by Ivan Gromov himself, Egor conducted the training workshop and cut the number of people to perform the task to two. After he listened to the complaints about him and accusations of his incompetency as the security service chief and a whimsical human being, which he had already got used to in one year of working at the base, Stroev set the time for the flight. He could completely relate to the scientists’ desire to leave the station for at least a short while and to feel the solid ground under their feet. Despite the impressive size of the base with its artificial gravitation and full simulation of an Earthly city, people were still feeling claustrophobic inside.

  However, the instructions must be followed. Besides, the replacement of a sensor for accurate diagnostics could be easily done by just one lab technician; there was no need to involve the entire IT department, which was twenty-five persons stron
g. After short hesitation, Egor decided to escort the lab technicians to the southern planetary station himself. In contrast to him, his subordinates on the security team had been deployed on Hanimed surface several times before during this year, so no one could say behind his back that he was abusing his position.

  Everything was going according to the plan. The IT technicians quickly identified the malfunction, opened up one of the twelve data sensors and started to work on its replacement happily. Stroev was pacing around the idling glider, fighting a childish desire to make a snowball and throw it into the matte dome of the station. The air temperature on the Hanimed poles was quite bearable, never went down below minus fifteen degrees Celsius. The air was pleasantly tingling his face. Egor unzipped the light protection suit on his chest. This side of the planet had a beautiful cool and bright day. The mother star E-356/74f was shining bright, but did not blind. The Hanimed snow had a reddish hue to it, was fine and in its texture reminded Egor of pollen. It was fun to watch it coming up the air in small pink clouds with every step.

  Later, he could not remember exactly when he felt a strange presence. Every professional, and Stroev, of course was a professional of the highest qualifications, felt danger in his or her own way. Some had their palms go cold or sweaty, some experienced a sharp pain in the gut, and others felt their skin crawl. Yes, the reaction to an invisible existential threat could be different and individual, but it couldn’t be taken for anything else. Egor’s body hair always rose under threat. And, surprisingly, on that side of the body that was facing the threat. While in training, his friends always teased him about this peculiarity. They even had their own sure-sign saying, “Stroev’s fur on the back is up, so we’ll sure get an extra guard duty.”