Chapter 14 Chapter 7 Miraculous Phenomena

At the TMA-1 site, the air-dome main building was only twenty feet in diameter, and it was uncomfortably crowded inside.Docking the car to it via two airlock doors provides some appreciated extra living space. The six scientists and technicians who have been engaged in this project for a long time all live and work in this hemispherical balloon with double walls.It also contained their machinery and instruments, all supplies that could not be placed outside in a vacuum, including cooking, washing and sanitation equipment, as well as geological specimens and a small TV screen that could constantly monitor the entire site.

Floyd was not surprised that Halvorson chose to stay in the igloo.The chief executive spoke his mind with commendable candor. "I think wearing a space suit is an inevitable liability," he said. "I wear it four times a year, and do the check flights every season. If you don't mind, I'm going to sit here and watch it on TV." Part of this prejudice is now untenable, because the latest space suits are infinitely more comfortable than the clumsy armor worn by the first men on the moon. Now it doesn't take a minute to put it on, or even help, it's pretty automatic.Floyd now put on the tight-fitting MK-5 spacesuit to protect him from the harshest environments on the moon, day or night.

He was accompanied by Dr. Michaels into a small airlock passage.The space suit stiffened almost imperceptibly when the sound of the air press was out of hearing, and he could feel himself entering a silent vacuum. The silence was broken by a welcome voice over the suit's radio. "Is the air pressure right, Dr. Floyd? Are you breathing normally?" "very good." His partner carefully checked the pointers and data on the instruments on the outside of Floyd's spacesuit.Then he said, "Okay—let's go." Within an hour of their group's arrival, the scene changed again.Although many stars and the semicircle of the earth are still shining, the fourteen-day night on the moon is drawing to a close.The corona loomed in the east, sparkling—suddenly, the top of a radio pole a hundred feet above Floyd's head seemed to burst into flames, reflecting the first rays of the erupting sun.

They waited for the on-site commander and his two assistants to walk out of the airlock passage, and then walked towards the mouth of the pit.When they reached the mouth of the crater, a narrow, hard-to-see incandescent light shot from the eastern horizon.Although it will take another hour to see the entire sun due to the slow rotation of the earth, the stars have disappeared. The pit was still in the shadows, but the floodlights erected around it illuminated the bottom of the pit.Floyd walked slowly down the slope towards the black rectangular plate, not only in awe, but also felt his own powerlessness.Here is but the gates of the Earth, but humanity has faced mysteries they may never be able to explain.Some power visited here three million years ago, left behind a symbol of its purpose—symbols that are difficult to comprehend, and may never be comprehensible—and returned to the planet or star.

The radio on Floyd's spacesuit interrupted his thoughts. "I'm the Field Commander. If you'd like to stand here, we'd like to take some pictures. Dr. Floyd, would you stand in the middle? - Dr. Michaels - thank you..." No one except Floyd seemed to think it was funny.He also had to admit, to be honest, that he was glad someone had brought a camera; the photo was undoubtedly historic, and he wanted a few, too.He wished his face could be seen clearly through the helmet of his spacesuit. "Thank you, everyone," said the photographer.The poses everyone posed in front of the plate were a bit unnatural, and the photographer took more than a dozen photos in a row. "We will ask the photography department of the base to distribute the photos to everyone."

Then Floyd turned all his attention to the black plate—slowly circling it, looking at it from every angle, trying to impress upon his mind its strange impression.He didn't intend to find anything, because he knew that every inch had been examined with a microscope. At this time, the slowly rising sun had already shone into the mouth of the crater, and the sun was shining on the east side of the plate.However, it seems to absorb every particle of light, as if the sunlight did not exist. Freud decided to try a simple experiment; he stood between the plate and the sun, and then looked for his own figure on the smooth black bun, but there was no trace.The bright light on the plate was at least ten kilowatts; if it had anything in it, it must have been cooked very quickly.

"How strange," thought Floyd, standing here looking at this—this thing—seeing sunlight for the first time since the ice ages began on Earth.He pondered its black color again; ideal for absorbing solar energy, of course.But he dismissed the notion at once; for who would faint enough to bury a solar-powered device twenty feet in the ground? He looked up at the earth, which was beginning to lose money in the morning light.Only a few of those six billion people know of the discovery; how will the world react when the news is finally released? Floyd was still wallowing in these reveries, when suddenly the speaker in his helmet let out a piercing electronic screech, like an overloaded, badly distorted time signal.Instinctively he tried to block his ears with his hands inside his spacesuit; then he came to himself and fumbled anxiously for the receiver controls on the radio.While he was still groping, four more screams erupted; then there was a reassuring silence.

On all sides of the pit, people stood in stunned gestures.So it wasn't just my equipment that was malfunctioning, Floford said to himself; everyone heard those electronic squeals. After three million years of twilight, TMA-1 greeted the dawn on the moon. One hundred million miles away from Mars, in a cold and lonely place where no human has ever been, the Cosmos Voyager 79 listener drifts through the intricate orbits of the planets.For three years, it performed its mission without error—a credit to the American scientists who designed it, the British engineers who built it, and the Russian technicians who launched it.Its light, cobweb-like antenna sifts incoming and outgoing radio waves—an endless crackle and hiss, Pascoll (1623-1662 AD), French philosopher, mathematician, physicist home.) in a simpler age had naively called it "the silence in space."Electromagnetic wave detectors record and analyze cosmic rays from the Milky Way and beyond; neutron and X-ray telescopes observe exotic stars never seen by the human eye; Currents, magnetometers measuring this solar blast and cyclone, all this, and many others, were patiently recorded by the Cosmic Voyage 79 monitor, stored in its crystal-clear memory.

One of its antennas—a now-common electrical marvel—was always pointed at a point not very far from the sun.If visible to the naked eye, its distant target can be seen every few months as a star, followed by a dimmer companion; most of the time, this companion disappears into the bright sunlight. Every twenty-four hours, the listener sent back to the distant planet Earth the intelligence it had patiently gathered, condensed into five-minute pulses.After a quarter of an hour, the pulse, traveling at the speed of light, reaches its destination. Since the first satellites were put into orbit almost fifty years ago, billions, if not trillions, of intelligence pulses have been sent back from the universe, all stored for later use in advancing knowledge.

At this time, the Cosmos 79 monitor recorded a strange event-a slight but obvious disturbance echoing throughout the solar system, completely different from any natural phenomenon measured in the past.It automatically records position, time and intensity; transmits information back to Earth a few hours later. The M-15 orbiting satellite orbiting Mars twice a day also recorded and transmitted the same information; there is also the No. 21 high-tilt probe slowly moving above the ecliptic plane; there is even No. 5 artificial comet, which at this time Heading toward the frigid space beyond Pluto, on an orbit that would take a thousand years to reach the other end.All recorded the energy of this particular burst that interfered with the equipment; all were automatically sent back to the memory device on the distant earth in turn.

Computers may never be able to detect any correlation between these four unique sets of signals, each coming from cosmic probes millions of miles apart in separate orbits. However, the electromagnetic wave forecasters at Goddard, USA, saw the morning report and immediately knew that there had been anomalies in the solar system in the past twenty-four hours.