The Pandora Probe

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

I was anchoring a set of attitude jets to a hundred-meter ring fragment, getting it ready for its long drop into the inner Solar System, when I spotted the artifact. It glistened under the ice like a fish in water, and I thought for a moment it might be a ring trout that had somehow burrowed into the rock-hard surface, but ring trout are gold and this was silver. When I scraped a flat spot in the ice to look through, I saw that this was long and cylindrical, without the tentacles of a ring trout, either.

It was about a meter deep, embedded in remarkably clear ice. Usually the frozen mountains we mine from Saturn’s rings have a milky, bubbly texture from all the fracture lines and voids left over from their accretion, but the area around the artifact was clear as glass. When I shined my spotlight at it I could hardly see the beam; just the silver cylinder resting there, about as big as a person’s thigh.

“Hey Gretchen,” I said. “I found something buried here.”

She was on the opposite side of the snowball, setting more jets, but with our shuttle drifting just a few klicks out to relay radio signals, her voice came through clear. “What sort of something?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe a piece of an old booster. It looks like it melted its way in.”

“Gonna dig it out?”

My air gauge, a big rectangular patch on my suit’s left forearm with glowing centimeter-high red numbers, said I had two hours of oxygen, enough to tunnel down to whatever it was in the ice and still have plenty to finish wiring the jets.

“Yeah, what the hell,” I said. “Could be worth something; who knows?” If it was part of one of the early probes, maybe we could sell it to a museum back home.

“Need a hand?”

“No, go ahead and finish your side. This shouldn’t take long.”

“All right.”

I had already set foot- and handholds in the ice so I could anchor the attitude jets; I made sure I had a good grip, then pressed the tip of my hand drill against the surface and pulled the trigger. Ice chips and steam blew outward as the vibrating tip and the hydrogen flame both ate into the surface. I leaned into it.

A drill isn’t the best excavation tool, but a ring miner learns to make do with what’s available. I sank a couple dozen holes all around the buried cylinder, then chipped between them with my axe, flaking off big chunks with each swing. It was hot, sweaty work, and I had to pause a couple of times to let my helmet unfog.

The fresh ice chips attracted a flock of periscope herons. They anchored themselves to the surface with their claws a few meters over my head and reached out with their filter-scoop mouths, sweeping them back and forth through the debris. It wasn’t so much the ice as the impurities in it they were after: minerals and stray organics from the nightoplankton and flutterbies, and other creatures that lived in the rings. I ignored them and kept digging. We hadn’t yet found anything to worry about among the local fauna.

Eventually I got down to metal. I chipped more carefully, glad the cylinder was lying sideways, and eventually pried it free. It was about as long as my space-suited arm, and twice as thick. It felt massive, definitely not empty. I worried for a second that it might be an unfired booster, its propellant unstable and ready to explode the moment I jarred it, but a quick look at both ends quieted my fears. Neither one had a nozzle.

The surface wasn’t smooth anyway, like a booster’s would be. It was covered with fine lines and little knobs and protrusions, some capped with glassy—lenses? It looked like some sort of instrument package. It could have been the core of an old exploration satellite, I supposed, with the antennas and solar array sheared off in its flight through the ring, but with the bumps and squiggly lines etched in the surface it didn’t look like any kind of satellite I’d ever heard of. As I drifted there in Saturn’s cold light, the ring a dusty halo around me, I knew it had to be, though. Just not one of ours.

Gretchen’s voice startled me. “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden, Jack. You OK?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “I got it out.”

“So what is it?”

“I think it’s a piece of an alien spacecraft.”

We met back at the shuttle. Gretchen was floating outside the airlock when I got there, gently shooing away a flock of flutterbies that had gathered on the ship, attracted by the heat. She had a little cloud of them around her, dancing about on their biological rockets and bouncing off one another like visible molecules in Brownian motion, their solar-collector parasails glittering in the sunlight. “This had better be good,” she said. “We’re supposed to have the jets in place by the end of our shift.”

I handed her the cylinder. She looked at it for a minute or so, silently, and when she did finally speak it was just one word: “Oh.”

There was no one thing about it that said “alien,” but all the same, nobody could look at it and come up with a different conclusion. It was like African art or baroque music to a North American; even if you’ve never seen or heard it before, you know on first exposure that it’s foreign. This was just a cylinder with bumps and lenses on it, but even so it had a definite alienness about it.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Should we take it inside?”

“The ice’ll melt. Might damage something.”

“Good point. We can melt it out here. In vacuum the water will boil away even if we warm it just a few degrees above freezing.”

So we strapped it to the hull where it would get a little thermal conduction going and we both aimed our spotlights at it. They’re a thousand watts each at full power; it didn’t take long before the ice began to bubble. Within a few minutes, the cylinder was dry.

Gretchen leaned close and squinted against the glare. “Doesn’t look like anything got inside,” she said. “It’s not outgassing.” She poked at one end with her glove. “There are threads here. It’s meant to be screwed off.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to be opening up some sort of alien Pandora’s box, but I supposed somebody would have to do it and it might as well be us. If there was anything to be learned from it, we might as well get in on it right from the start.

And if it blew up in our faces, well, better it happened out here in the ring than back at the station.

We unstrapped the cylinder and took it inside. I giggled once, and Gretchen said, “What?”

“It feels so strange. Just carrying this thing in like a bag lull of tools. I feel like we should be more… reverent or something.”

“Like this?” Gretchen tucked her feet into footholds just inside the airlock and bowed up and down with her hands outstretched, saying, “Ooga booga wooga…”

I laughed and let the artifact drift free while we took off our pressure suits, then I reached out and held it for the first time with my bare hands. It was still cold.

The lenses—if that’s what they were—glittered like windows spaced evenly around the cylinder, six of them in the middle and one on either end. I wondered for a moment if they might be windows, and if I was holding an entire interstellar spaceship in my hands, but the screw cap on the end made me doubt that. It looked more like a mailing tube than a starship.

Gretchen pulled herself up close and looked it over, too. “Those bumps look like latch points,” she said, pointing to the dozen or so mushroom-shaped knobs dotting the surface.

When I’d first seen it, I’d thought its antennas and solar panels might have been sheared off, but now that Gretchen pointed it out I could see they had been jettisoned, if there had ever been any in the first place. Something had been attached to those knobs, anyway, and later released.

Spidery, squiggly lines weaved around the knobs and lenses. “Could that be writing?” I asked.

Gretchen squinted. “If it is, whoever wrote it had no concept of sentences or punctuation.” She was right. The lines ran continuously around and around the cylinder, sometimes crossing one another, a few of them even winding around the latch points a time or two before continuing on.

They all led to—or issued from—the screw cap on the end.

“Well,” I said, “I think it’s pretty obvious where the action is.”

“You think we should tell anybody what we’ve got before we fool with it?” Gretchen asked.

I shook my head. “You know what they’ll do. They’ll tell us to bring it in for somebody professional to open, and we’ll never see it again.”

“Probably.”

So we strapped it to the work bench we use to repair our tools on, and we unscrewed the cap on the end. I expected the threads to be reversed, but they weren’t. They weren’t even especially tight. I had to put both hands on it and brace my feet in the grips on the floor, but I’ve opened jar lids that were tighter. The cap spun off counterclockwise on fine, precisely machined threads, and I heard a little hiss toward the last as air rushed inside.

Then I pulled the cap off and peered in, half expecting an alien monster to leap out and take my head off, but the cylinder was lined with tiny cubes, each maybe a centimeter on a side. In the center, packed tight in some kind of crinkly foil, was a rectangular object about the size of a deck of cards. I tugged on it gently, sliding it out from its nest, and saw a square indentation on the end, just the right size to plug one of the cubes into. There was a bump off center in the recessed square, no doubt matching a depression in each cube so you could only plug them in one way. A row of tiny projections stuck out of one side.

The size of the thing branded it uncommon, but otherwise this seemed as familiar as the outside of the package was different. The aliens had sent us a book reader and an entire library of books.

“Holy shit, does it work?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m not sure I want to find out.” I held the reader in my hand, looking at one face, then the other. Either one could have been a display. Maybe both were, for redundancy.

What creature had last held this, and how long ago? And why had they sent it to us? Did it contain greetings? Blueprints for new technology? Religious instruction? If each of those cubes held as much information as a regular book disk, then I guessed they had sent all three and then some. Given molecular memory—and I saw no reason to suppose they didn’t have it, since we were close to achieving it ourselves—the entire library of human knowledge could probably fit in those cubes several times over.

Gretchen looked at me impatiently. “What do you mean? Turn it on.”

I looked for the power button, but none of the bumps on the side slid or pushed in or moved in any way. “It can’t have power,” I said. “It was buried under a meter of ice. It’s been there for a long time.”

“How do you know what it can or can’t do?” she asked.

“Good point. Here, you try it.” I handed the reader to her. While she studied it I pulled out the crinkled packing material, hoping for a drawing or something, but there wasn’t anything written on it. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up. This book reader with no instructions seemed somehow ominous.

“Could the memory cubes provide the power to run it, too?” Gretchen asked, reaching into the cylinder and taking a cube from the rack. She plugged it into its socket and tried each of the buttons again. Still nothing.

I could almost taste my relief.

She tried another cube, with the same results. “OK, you’re right, the batteries are probably dead,” she said, and she flipped the reader over, looking for the battery cover that would be there in any human-built model.

“Let’s slow down a minute here,” I said. “Do we really want to do this?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“I’m not sure. I’m just thinking aloud. But we know what this has got to be, right?”

Gretchen laughed. “Do we? Maybe it’s a recorder. Maybe all these cubes are blank, and we’re supposed to fill them up with everything we know and box it up and ship it back to them.”

The look on my face made her laugh even harder. “I was kidding, idiot. It’s a library. It’s got to be.” She found a seam running all the way around near the bottom of the reader, and tried twisting, prying with a fingernail, pulling and squeezing. When she squeezed it, something gave with a snap.

“Uh oh.”

But a moment later, one of the flat faces began to glow white.

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s like a light stick; you have to break the pouch with the catalyst in it before it’ll work.”

She started pushing the buttons on the side. The top one did the trick: when she touched it the screen flickered again and a milky white sphere of light about the size of a spacesuit helmet expanded into being in front of it. Gretchen tilted the reader so the sphere was on top. I was drifting at about a forty-five degree angle from her; I pulled myself around so we were both using the same surface for a floor and took a better look at it.

After a few seconds it cleared to near-transparency and an animated hologram showed two smooth white balls that might have been stars orbiting one another. The quality of the hologram was excellent; the images looked so solid I felt as if I could reach in and touch them. I was just about to suggest we were seeing the builders’ home star system when the balls moved apart and their orbits slowed, then one of them shrank to a speck and orbited the other one, then the situation reversed and the second one orbited the first.

“Looks like it’s trying to get across Kepler’s laws,” Gretchen said. The balls continued to move around one another, going into elliptical orbits and parabolic flybys and eventually splitting into three, then four bodies in various combinations of orbits.

If there was any sound, it was beyond the range of our hearing.

“OK so we have an orbital mechanics text,” I said, relieved that it was understandable, yet getting impatient with the simplistic animation. “Let’s try something else.”

“OK” Gretchen popped the cube free and the hologram sphere swirled into static, then disappeared.

“I wonder if we’re supposed to turn it off first?” I asked.

Gretchen shrugged. “If I were designing something for aliens to use, I’d make it as foolproof as possible.”

“Good point.” I took the cube from her and put it back in its niche in the cylinder, then pulled loose the one next to it.

This one showed us how to shave ice or quartz or some other clear mineral into a lens to focus sunlight; how to melt iron and flatten it into sheets; and how to bend the sheets into a parabolic mirror to collect even more sunlight.

Another cube showed how to make an electrical generator, and another one showed how to make a rocket by electrolyzing water and recombining the hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. None of them showed us anything about the aliens who had sent the cubes; just the abstract information.

So far the technology had been familiar, but we were still just working off the first row of cubes. There were hundreds of them deeper inside the cylinder. I reached about halfway in and plucked one at random from the array, and when we played it the level of sophistication had definitely changed.

The image in the sphere was either a machine or an organism, I couldn’t tell which. It was all curves and smooth surfaces, and we were seeing the interior as well as the exterior, as if in X-rays. That got me wondering if the reader was producing X-rays. The images were all in white light, as if to provide as wide a spectrum as possible for alien viewers’ eyes, so it was possible that the wavelengths extended beyond the visible; but my spacesuit was still adrift near the airlock and its radiation warning was silent, so I relaxed. About that, at least.

The holographic object was either some sort of pump, a fluid switching system, a symbolic interpretation of an electronic circuit, or none of the above. The image focused deeper and deeper inside it, highlighting various parts, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. Tubes and walls kept moving around seemingly at random, new structures grew and resorbed for no apparent reason, and yet the whole object continued to do nothing that I could identify as a usual function.

“Does this make any more sense to you that it does to me?” I asked Gretchen.

“Well sure, that goes without saying,” she answered with a grin. “But that still doesn’t mean I get it.” She touched one of the buttons on the reader’s side and the image shifted to a much more complex something-or-other, of which the first unit was a minor component at the junction of six arms sticking out at right angles.

“That must have been extreme fast-forward,” she said, touching the button again. Now we were looking at something like a snowflake.

“I wish we had some sense of scale,” I said. “I mean, is this a virus or a space station?”

“You got me. But I’ll tell you what this is,” Gretchen said, hefting the reader in her hand. “It’s the galaxy on a platter, that’s what it is.”

I nodded. “I think you’re right. But is that necessarily a good thing?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

I shrugged, finding it difficult to put my misgivings into words. “Well,” I said, “it’ll probably upset a lot of what we’re doing out here. For instance, if there’s a plan for a ground-to-orbit elevator in there, then the orbital colonies probably aren’t going to be importing their volatiles from Saturn anymore. They’ll get them directly from Earth.”

Gretchen laughed. “What, you’re worried about your job?”

“Maybe. I’m worried about a lot of things. I worry what will happen to us if we accept everything in here without question. I worry that maybe this isn’t as innocuous a package as it seems.”

Gretchen pointed a finger at the holographic snowflake. “You think this might be a machine that’ll make the Sun go nova or something?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think there’s plans for a machine to blow up the Sun. If they’d wanted to do that, they’d have just sent the machine. But there’s almost certainly a plan in there. Interstellar travel takes a lot of energy. You don’t send something like this without a reason. So what’s their reason? What’s in it for them?”

Gretchen shrugged. “Maybe this is just their way of saying hello. Maybe they intend to visit, and they want to make sure we have hot and cold running water when they get here. How should I know? They’re alien.”

I took the book reader from her and held it in my hand. It was narrower than a human would have made it, and thicker; it didn’t feel comfortable in my grip, but it came close. It could have been far stranger than it was. I said, “They aren’t that alien. They want something from us, guaranteed. And I’m really uneasy about accepting anything from them until I know what they want in return.”

“Come on, you’re being paranoid.”

“You’re damn right I’m being paranoid. The stuff in these memory cubes could change—could change, hell, will change—humanity. I want to know what those changes will be before I turn it loose.”

Gretchen sighed in exasperation. “Who knows? There could be a million different things we’ve never heard of in here. How can we know what effect they’re going to have until we at least find out what they are?”

“Yes, how can we know? But once we’ve learned all the stuff in here, how do we un-learn it if we don’t like what we see?” I popped the cube loose from the top of the reader, and the image swirled into static, but I knew I could see it again whenever I closed my eyes. If I’d actually understood what it was, there would be no way I could forget it.

Gretchen watched me put the cube back in the rack. “What do you want to do, just seal this up again and toss it back out into the ring?”

“I was thinking more of tying a pair of attitude jets to it and sending it down to Saturn.”

I didn’t often astonish my co-workers, but Gretchen was astonished now. “You’re kidding. This is a care package from another civilization! It’s a gift!”

Patiently, I tried again to explain. “Yes, I agree; it’s certainly that. And I think it may be a trap, too.”

“Well, what did you dig it out for if you think that way?”

That one stopped me for a moment. Why had I been so hot to retrieve it? “Because I thought it was part of a probe, I guess. Something we could stand up in a museum and show everybody, or maybe take apart and figure out how it was built, maybe learn a few things, but I didn’t think it was a goddam encyclopedia.”

Gretchen shook her head, unbelieving. “What you’re telling me is that you’re afraid of knowledge. ‘There are things mankind was not meant to know.’ Well that’s bullshit. We—”

“No, that’s not it at all.” Waving the reader for emphasis, I said, “Look, we just saw a demonstration of how to smelt iron without the use of fire. Can you imagine how different things would be now if we had picked this up before we learned to do it our way?”

“Oh come on; you think we wouldn’t have discovered fire? The first little kid with a magnifying glass would have figured that out.”

“Maybe. But how about the generator? We developed that on our own, too, but what about the stuff we learned from the blind alleys? If we’d had electricity earlier, would we have developed internal combustion engines? Drilled for oil? Made plastics?”

“So what if we hadn’t? If we need to know something, it’s probably in there.” Gretchen nodded toward the canister full of memory cubes.

“Exactly!” I said. “If we need to know it, it’s probably in there, but who decides what we need to know? They do. But what if theirs isn’t the only way? What if theirs isn’t even the best way? With this stuff to look at every time we have a question, do you think we’ll ever come up with anything different? That’s the problem. I’m afraid of what won’t happen if we take this alien gift. I’m afraid what we won’t become, and that’s unique. We’ll be just like them.” A sudden realization made me laugh.

“What?” Gretchen asked.

“You said it yourself: ‘Maybe they intend to visit, and they want to make sure we have hot and cold running water when they get here.’ That’s exactly what they want. They don’t care if we go visit them first or if they visit us, but either way they don’t want any surprises. They want to make sure we’re civilized when we meet. Their idea of civilized.”

“So you want to hang onto our spears and our warpaint just to spite them?” Gretchen shook her head. “I don’t buy it, Jack.”

Of course she wouldn’t. The threat wasn’t personal enough for her to take seriously. “All right then, what do you want to do?” I asked. “Turn it over to the UN, or keep it for ourselves and get rich off the patents?”

“Huh?” She hadn’t expected that.

So I asked the next question: “And if we keep it for ourselves, do we want to admit to anyone that we’ve got it, or would you rather live the rest of your life without bodyguards?”

“Bodyguards?”

I didn’t bother to answer; she figured it out before I could have explained it anyway. So I said, “And do we want to warn our friends to dump their stock before the market collapses, or do we just brush them off like the pitiful worms that they are? For that matter, I suspect we’d better wait at least until we’ve been rotated back to Earth before we spring this on anyone, or we’re liable to wake up in vacuum some night. Or starve to death out here when the supply shut-ties quit running.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

I started packing the reader back into the cylinder. “I’m talking about complete economic panic, that’s what. When news of this gets out, every research project in the Solar System is going to come to a screeching halt. No point in re-inventing the wheel, after all. Factories won’t know whether what they’re producing will be obsolete next week, so people will dump their stock. Workers will lose their jobs, and—”

“I get the picture.” Gretchen pushed off from the workbench, drifted to the airlock, bounced off toward the deck, and kicked off back to the workbench. Zero-g pacing.

“So what’s it going to be?” I asked.

She glared at me as I wadded up the crinkly foil and stuffed it around the reader again. “It doesn’t have to be a choice between armageddon or the status quo,” she said.

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But I’m not sure enough about that to risk it.” I shoved the last of the foil inside, then picked up the end cap and screwed it back on. “Besides,” I said, “I kind of like the status quo. I like being an ice miner, sending water into the inner system for the colonies. I like knowing there are colonies, and that we’ve got a frontier again. I’d kind of like to keep that going for a while.”

“So you’re going to drop this into Saturn and just go back to work?” she asked.

I unstrapped the cylinder from the workbench and held it in my hands again. The entire knowledge of an alien race. Could I throw it all away? Would Gretchen let me if I tried?

There was only one way to find out. I shoved the cylinder past her into the airlock and started putting on my spacesuit. Gretchen watched silently as I slid into the legs and zipped up the chest, then with a sigh she began putting on her own suit.

“Can we at least compromise a little?” she asked.

I hesitated with my helmet over my head. “Like how?”

“Like just put it back into the rings with a coded transponder on it, so we can find it again if we have to. We can each put in half the code, so it’ll take both of us to turn it on, but that way we’ll have an ace in the hole if we need it.”

I didn’t like the idea, but as soon as she proposed it I knew it made sense. The Universe wasn’t necessarily a friendly place. There might come a time when we needed the aliens’ knowledge. The trick would be in knowing when we didn’t.

I wondered if Gretchen would come back and look for it on her own. It probably wouldn’t matter if she did; things drifted in the rings, and by the time she could get back here on her own with a ship to look for it, it could be thousands of kilometers away. Even with radar, she could search for centuries without finding it.

“OK,” I said. “We can compromise.”

So we robbed the transponder from an attitude jet and keyed in eight numbers each, then went outside and found a smaller ice boulder to embed the whole business in. One that would be too small to attract a miner’s attention.

When we were done, I waved toward the hundred-meter mountain where I’d found it and said, “Come on, we’ve still got to finish mounting the attitude jets on that snowball out there.”

Gretchen let out a long sigh. “Right.”

We kicked off, scaring a handful of flutterbies off the surface with our motion. A ring trout had been nosing around the scar I’d left in the ice, but with a flick of a tentacle it bounced away, dodging behind another chunk of ice. I watched it flee, and as I looked out over the surface of Saturn’s rings I wondered how many more time bombs were hidden in their depths. And why here? Why hadn’t the aliens planted their package closer to Earth, where we could have discovered it as soon as we got into space? Then, when we’d been struggling with limited resources and hadn’t yet begun to build settlements in orbit, we’d have been much more vulnerable to the temptation.

Another ring trout swept past overhead, this one almost two meters long. Its single eye swiveled down toward us as it drifted over, and one of its tentacles dipped down, hesitated, then withdrew. Caution had won out over curiosity.

I suddenly shivered as I watched the trout move on, hunting for easier prey. I must have said something, because Gretchen asked, “What?”

“I just realized something,” I answered. “That package wasn’t meant for us. It was meant for them. For the trout. Or their descendants. The aliens weren’t afraid of us at all.”

Gretchen’s laugh was wild, almost maniacal. “They should have been,” she said. “Anybody who’d throw away all the knowledge in the Universe is someone to fear.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking up out of the ring plane into dark space and the stars. “And so are the people who handed it out.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ring trout and the ecosystem they inhabit first appeared in “Big Two-Sided River,” in our February 1989 issue.