Chief Engineer, Division C, World Communications Headquarters, Tehran. Not the sort of address you’d associate with gem smuggling and interplanetary skulduggery…. “So over to Tehran-just in time to miss him, but no matter. He’ll be at the same location now for a couple of days, and in view of his background, at last we’ve got something that makes a little sense.
“World Com’s Division C are the boys who keep Project CYCLOps running. And even I have heard of that.”
It had been conceived in the first bright dawn of the Space Age; the largest, most expensive, and potentially most promising scientific instrument ever devised. Though it could serve many purposes, one was paramount-the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
One of the oldest dreams of mankind, this remained no more than a dream until the rise of radio astronomy, in the second half of the twentieth century. Then, within the short span of two decades, the combined skills of the engineers and the scientists gave humanity power to span the interstellar gulfs if it was willing to pay the price.
The first puny radio telescopes, a few tens of meters in diameter, had listened hopefully for signals from the stars. No one had really
expected success from these pioneering efforts, nor was it achieved. Making certain plausible assumptions about the distribution of intelligence in the Galaxy, it was easy to calculate that the detection of a radio-emitting civilization would require telescopes not decameters, but kilometers, in aperture.
There was only one practical method of achieving this resultat least, with structures confined to the surface of the Earth. To build a single giant bowl was out of the question, but the same result could be obtained from an array of hundreds of smaller ones. CYCLOPS was visualized as an antenna “farm” of hundred-meter dishes, uniformly spaced over a circle perhaps five kilometers across. The faint signals from each element in this army of antennas would be added together, and then cunningly processed by computers programmed to look for the unique signatures of intelligence against the background of cosmic noise.
The whole system would cost as much as the original Apollo Project. But unlike Apollo, it could proceed in installments, over a period of years or even decades. As soon as a relatively few antennas had been built, CYCLOPS could start operating. From the very beginning, it would be a tool of immense value to the radio astonomers. Over the years, more and more antennas could be installed, until eventually the whole array was filled in; and all the while CYCLOPS would steadily increase in power and capability, able to probe deeper and deeper into the universe.
It was a noble vision, though there were some who feared its success as much as its possible failure. However, during the Time of Troubles that brought the twentieth century to its unlamented close, there was little hope of funding such a project. It could be considered only during a period of political and financial stability; and therefore CYCLOPS did not get under way until a hundred years after the initial design studies.
A child of the brief but brilliant Muslim Renaissance, it helped to absorb some of the immense wealth accumulated by the Arab countries
during the 238 Oil Age. The millions of tons of metal required came from the virtually limitless resources of the Red Sea brines, oozing along the Great Rift
Valley. Here, where the crust of the Earth was literally coming apart at the seams as the continental plates slowly separated, were metals and minerals enough to banish all fear of shortages for centuries to come.
Ideally CYCLOPS should have been situated on the Equator, so that its questing radio mirrors could sweep the heavens from pole to pole. Other requirements were a good climate, freedom from earthquakes or other natural disasters-and, if possible, a ring of mountains to act as a shield against radio interference. Of course, no perfect site existed, and political, geographical, and engineering compromises had to be made. After decades of often acrimonious discussion, the desolate “Empty Quarter” of Saudi Arabia was chosen; it was the first time that anyone had ever found a use for it.
Wide tracks were roughly graded through the wilderness so that ten-thousand-ton hover-freighters could carry in components from the factories on the shore of the Red Sea. Later, these were supplemented by cargo airships. In the first phase of the project, sixty parabolic antennas were arranged in the form of a giant cross, it’s five-kilometer arms extending north-south, east-west. Some of the faithful objected to this symbol of an alien religion, but it was explained to them that this was only a temporary state of affairs. When the “Eye of Allah” was completed, the offending sign would be utterly lost in the total array of seven hundred huge dishes, spaced uniformly over a circle eighty square kilometers in extent.
