Sleeping Giants (Themis Files #1)(7)
Location: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
—Could it be the Davis experiment?
—I do not know. Could it? What is the Davis experiment?
—I’m sorry. I’m talking to myself. It has to be argon! I should have thought of that. My father worked at the mine for so long.
—What mine? I know what argon is, but I am obviously missing whatever point you are trying to make.
—In the late sixties, a couple of astrophysicists devised an experiment to collect and count neutrino particles emanating from the sun. I remember reading about it when I was a kid. They built a big pool of dry-cleaning fluid almost five thousand feet belowground to shield it from other solar phenomena and basically just waited for neutrinos to hit it. When a chlorine atom is hit by a neutrino, it turns into a radioactive isotope of argon—argon-37, to be precise. Every once in a while, they would bubble up helium to collect the argon and they were able to count the atoms that were hit. Beautiful science, they took something purely theoretical and managed to turn it into something concrete. They ran this experiment for nearly twenty-five years at the Homestake mine where my father worked, a couple miles from where I fell onto the hand. I’m willing to bet these things react in proximity to the argon.
—I am not a physicist, as you know, but…
—I don’t know anything about you.
—Well, now you know I am not a physicist. In any case, I was thinking that the amount of radioactive material that could travel that distance must be infinitesimal.
—It is. But, however minute the amount may be, it can’t just be a coincidence. The helicopter that crashed in Turkey was collecting air samples to detect signs of nuclear testing. That’s what they would have been looking for, traces of argon-37. The pilot said they flew in some large equipment with them to Turkey. It would have been a MARDS—Movable Argon Detection System—or something like that. In any case, it’s a big machine that can detect argon-37. An underground nuclear reaction will turn the surrounding calcium into just that. It’s a pretty reliable way of detecting a nuclear site. You can’t hide from it. You can’t cheat. Calcium’s everywhere, in sand, in rocks, in people, and some of the argon that a nuclear blast would create will eventually escape into the air, no matter how deep the explosion.
—You implied there are other isotopes of argon. Would it react to any of them or just this one?
—It would have to be just this one. There’s a whole lot of argon-40 in the atmosphere, everywhere, other isotopes as well. But, I agree, it does seem odd that these artifacts would react to something so specific…
—Can you…
—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I meant to say unless, of course, they were designed that way. It would really be clever if they did that on purpose.
—What do you mean? Who is “they”?
—This might sound a little crazy, but hear me out. Suppose you encountered some civilization that’s too far behind technologically for you to engage in any sort of dialogue with. Anyone capable of building these things would have scared the hell out of people six thousand years ago. They would have been seen as gods, demons, supernatural beings of one kind or another. Now, say you wanted to leave something for them to discover, but only once they had evolved to a certain point.
—How would you measure their evolution?
—You’d want to know when they reached a sufficient understanding of the universe for you to be able to communicate with them in a meaningful way. It would most likely have to be measured technologically. It seems reasonable to assume that most or all species similar to humans would go through more or less the same evolutionary steps. Make fire, invent the wheel, those types of things. Flight might be a good criterion, or spaceflight. If you can look up at the sky, it’s safe to say you’ll eventually try to find a way to get up there, and space-faring species might at least be open to the idea of not being alone in the universe. Unless you were there to observe, you would need a way to detect whatever evolutionary landmark you chose. If you hid these things on a moon, for example, you’d know they’d only be found once they’re able to reach that far.
From where I stand, being able to harness nuclear energy would also be a pretty good criterion. Now—and this is the clever part—if you designed these things to react specifically to argon-37, they could only be discovered once that civilization managed to tap the power of the atom. This is all pure speculation, or course, but if that’s what they did, I’m impressed.
In any case, I think we have to take another look at the panels. We’re going to need a linguist after all.
—I thought you said there was no point?
—That was before I knew about the argon. If that site was built there for us to discover, there has to be something in it that we can figure out. If you were to build a structure, say a temple, for your own people, you’d write things in it that make sense to you. But if you were building that same temple for someone else, you’d want what you write to also mean something to whomever you built it for. There’s just no point in writing a message if you know the person you write it for will never be able to understand it.
—Quite a few established linguists have already looked at the markings and come up with nothing. What makes you think the outcome would be any different this time around?
—I can’t tell you why it would work now. I do have a pretty good idea why it didn’t work the first time around. They were looking for something that wasn’t there.