By the end of the twenty-first century, however, only half of the planned seven hundred elements had been installed. Two hundred of them had filled in most of the central core of the array, and the rest formed a kind of picket fence, outlining the circumference of the giant instrument. This reduction in scale, while saving billions of so lars had degraded performance only slightly. CYCLOPS had fulfilled
virtually all its design objectives, and during the course of the twenty-second century had wrought almost as great a revolution in astronomy as had the reflectors on Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar, two hundred years earlier. By the end of that century, however, it had run into trouble-through no fault of its builders, or of the army of engineers and scientists who served it.
CYCLOPS could not compete with the systems that had now been built on the far side of the Moonalmost perfectly shielded from terrestrial interference by three thousand kilometers of solid rock. For many decades, it had worked in conjunction with them, for two great telescopes at either end of an
Earth-Moon baseline formed an interferometer that could probe details of planetary systems hundreds of light-years away. But now there were radio telescopes on Mars; the Lunar observatory could achieve far more with their cooperation than it could ever do with nearby Earth. A baseline two hundred million kilometers long allowed one to survey the surrounding stars with a precision never before imagined.
As happens sooner or later with all scientific instruments, technical developments had by-passed CYCLOPS. But by the mid-twenty-third century it was facing another problem, which might well prove fatal. The Empty Quarter was no longer a desert.
CYCLOPS had been built in a region which might see no rains for five years at a time. At Al Hadidah, there were meteorites that had lain un rusting in the sand since the days of the Prophet. All this had been changed by reforestation and climate control; for the first time since the Ice Ages, the deserts were in re treat. More rain now fell on the Empty Quarter in days than had once fallen in years.
The makers of CYCLOPS had never anticipated this.
They had, reasonably enough, based all their designs on a hot, and environment. Now the maintenance staff was engaged in a continual battle against corrosion humidity in coaxial cables, fungus-induced breakdowns in high-tension circuits, and all the other ills that afflict electronic equipment if given the slightest chance. Some of the hundred-meter antennas had even rusted up solidly, so that they
could no longer be moved and had to be taken out of service. For almost twenty years, the system had been working at slowly decreasing efficiency, while the engineers, administrators, and scientists carried out a triangular argument, no one party being able to convince either of the others. Was it worth investing billions of so lars to refurbish the system—or would the money be better spent on the other side of the Moon? It was impossible to arrive at any clear-cut decision, for no one had ever been able to put a value on pure scientific research.
Whatever its present problems, CYCLOPs had been a spectacular success, helping reshape man’s views of the universe not once, but many times. It had pushed back the frontiers of knowledge to the very microsecond after the Big Bang itself, and had trapped radio waves that had circumnavigated the entire span of creation. It had probed the surfaces of distant stars, detected their hidden planets, and discovered such strange entities as neutrino suns, anti tachyons gravitational lenses, space quakes and revealed the mind-wrenching realms of negative-probability “Ghost” states and inverted matter.
But there was one thing that it had not done. Despite scores of false alarms, it had never succeeded in detecting signals from intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe.
Either Man was alone, or nobody else was using radio transmitters. The
two explanations seemed equally improbable.
MEETING AT CYCLOPS
He had known what to expect, or so he had believed, but the reality was still overwhelming. Duncan felt like a child in a forest of giant metal trees, extending in every direction to the limit of vision. Each of the identical “trees” had a slightly tapering trunk fifty meters high, with a stairway spiraling round it up to the platform supporting the drive mechanism. Looming above this was the huge yet surprisingly delicate hundred-meter-wide bowl of the antenna itself, tilted toward the sky as it listened for signals from the deeps of space.
Antenna 005, as its number indicated, was near the center of the array, but it was impossible to tell this by visual inspection. Whichever way Duncan looked, the ranks and columns of steel towers dwindled into the distance until eventually they formed a solid wall of metal.
