Chapter 12 Chapter V Listening to Reports

The briefings took place in a rectangular room.The room is large enough to accommodate a hundred people. A total of 40 to 50 people were waiting for Floyd. When he entered the room after the chief executive, everyone stood up politely.Floyd nodded to a few acquaintances and whispered to Halvorson: "Before the briefing, I would like to say a few words." Amid a round of polite applause, Floyd stepped up to the podium, smiled at the crowd around him and said, "Thank you—I just wanted to say a few words. The President asked me to convey how much he values ​​your work, and we hope It won't be long before the world judges your work properly. I fully understand," he went on cautiously, "that some of you—maybe most of you—are eager to ask your superiors to lift your current status of secrecy; if you don't If you think about it that way, you’re not a scientist.”

He caught a glimpse of Dr. Michaels now, his face wrinkled with a slight frown, more prominently showing a long scar on his right cheek - supposedly the result of some cosmic accident.He was well aware that the geophysicist had been protesting what he called "cops-and-robbers boring secrecy." "However, I should warn you," continued Floyd, "that this is a rather unique situation. We must be absolutely sure of the facts; if we get it wrong this time, we may never get another chance—so, isn't it? Wait patiently for a while longer. This is also the President's wish.

"That's all I have to say. I'm ready to hear your reports now." He walked back to his seat; the administrator said, "Thank you very much, Dr. Floyd," and nodded rather bluntly to his chief scientist.The lights dimmed as Dr. Michaels stepped up to the pulpit at the sign of the officer. A picture of the moon is displayed on the screen.In the center of the disc-like bright moon is a gleaming white crater, from which a rather prominent light radiates in all directions.At first glance, it looked almost as if someone had thrown a sack of flour on the surface of the moon and it was flying in all directions.

"On this vertical image," said Michaels, pointing to the central crater, "Tejo is even more pronounced than when viewed from Earth; Viewed from an angle—from a thousand miles up vertically—one can see that it dominates the entire hemisphere.” After he had given Floyd an impression of the unfamiliar side of the familiar object, he went on: "Over the past year we have carried out magnetic surveys of this region from low-altitude satellites. Just completed last month— And that's what it turned out to be -- the map that caused so much trouble." Another image was displayed on the screen; it looked like a contour map, but it showed magnetic strength rather than altitude.Most of the curves are roughly parallel and far apart; but, in one corner of the map, the curves are clustered together in a series of concentric circles—like the figure of a knothole in a piece of wood.

It is obvious even to the uninitiated that something special happened to the magnetic field of the moon in this part; in the lower part of the map it is written in large horizontal letters: "Taijo Magnetic Variation - Figure 1 (TMA-1)." Covered in the upper right corner Stamped "Confidential". "At first we thought it might be a protruding magnet, but all geological data pointed to the contrary. Also, it is unlikely that even a large nickel-iron meteorite would have produced such a strong magnetic field; so we decided to take a look at it in situ. "The first expedition found nothing—just plain plains, buried under a thin layer of lunar dust. They drilled a drill right in the middle of the magnetic field and extracted core for study. By twenty ft. deep. The rig stalled. So the expedition dug—and dare I say, not easy digging in a spacesuit.

"What they found brought them back to base immediately. We sent a larger party with better equipment. They dug for two weeks—the results are known." The dimly lit conference room suddenly fell silent, waiting for the picture on the screen to change. Although everyone has seen it many times, no one does not lean forward, as if hoping to discover new details.On Earth and the Moon, fewer than a hundred people have been granted permission to see this single image so far. The image shows a man in a bright red and yellow spacesuit standing at the bottom of an excavation pit, holding a measuring stick with metric marks engraved on it.The image is clearly a nighttime photograph and could have been taken from any part of the Moon or Mars.However, so far, such a scenario has never occurred on any planet.

Behind the man in the spacesuit rose a slab of inky matter, some ten feet high and five feet wide; it reminded Floyd ominously of a giant tombstone. "TMA-1," Dr. Michaels announced, with an almost reverent tone in his voice. "It looks brand new, doesn't it? No wonder people say it was only made a few years ago and try to connect it to the third Chinese expedition in '98. But I never thought of it that way—and Now we have been able to date it absolutely, based on the local geology. "My colleagues and I, Dr. Floyd, can vouch for our reputation. TMA-1 has nothing to do with the Chinese.Indeed, it has nothing to do with humans—for there were no humans when it was buried here.

"You know, it's almost three million years old. What you're seeing here is the first evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.