Lightspeed: Year One

Outside, kids were shouting, tossing a football around. “Greek?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“A message from Plato.”

He just shook his head as if to say: Who knew?

“Well, Frank, I guess that explains why they called it the Cassandra Project.”

“She wasn’t a Greek, was she?”

“You have another theory?”

“Maybe Cassegrain was too hard for the people in the Oval Office to pronounce.”

I told Mary what I knew. She wasn’t happy. “I really wish you’d left it alone, Jerry.”

“There’s no way I could have done that.”

“Not now, anyhow.” She let me see her frustration. “You know what it’ll mean for the Agency, right? If NASA lied about something like this, and it becomes public knowledge, nobody will ever trust us again.”

“It was a long time ago, Mary. Anyhow, the Agency wasn’t lying. It was the Administration.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Good luck selling that one to the public.”

The NASA storage complex at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville is home to rockets, a lunar landing vehicle, automated telescopes, satellites, a space station, and a multitude of other devices that had kept the American space program alive, if not particularly robust, over almost seventy years. Some were housed inside sprawling warehouses; others occupied outdoor exhibition sites.

I parked in the shadow of a Saturn V, the rocket that had carried the Apollo missions into space. I’ve always been impressed with the sheer audacity of anybody who’d be willing to sit on top of one of those things while someone lit the fuse. Had it been up to me, we’d probably never have lifted off at Kitty Hawk.

I went inside the Archive Office, got directions and a pass, and fifteen minutes later entered one of the warehouses. An attendant escorted me past cages and storage rooms filled with all kinds of boxes and crates. Somewhere in the center of it all, we stopped at a cubicle while the attendant compared my pass with the number on the door. The interior was visible through a wall of wire mesh. Cartons were piled up, all labeled. Several were open, with electronic equipment visible inside them.

The attendant unlocked the door and we went in. He turned on an overhead light and did a quick survey, settling on a box that was one of several on a shelf. My heart rate started to pick up while he looked at the tag. “This is it, Mr. Carter,” he said. “Cassandra.”

“Is this everything?”

He checked his clipboard. “This is the only listing we have for the Cassandra Project, sir.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

There was no lock. He raised the hasp on the box, lifted the lid, and stood back to make room. He showed no interest in the contents. He probably did this all the time, so I don’t know why that surprised me.

Inside, I could see a rectangular object wrapped in plastic. I couldn’t see what it was, but of course I knew. My heart was pounding by then. The object was about a foot and a half wide and maybe half as high. And it was heavy. I carried it over to a table and set it down. Wouldn’t do to drop it. Then I unwrapped it.

The metal was black, polished, reflective, even in the half-light from the overhead bulb. And sure enough, there were the Greek characters. Eight lines of them.

The idea that Plato was saying hello seemed suddenly less far-fetched. I took a picture. Several pictures. Finally, reluctantly, I rewrapped it and put it back in the box.

“So,” said Frank, “what did it say?”

“I have the translation here.” I fished it out of my pocket but he shook his head.

“My eyes aren’t that good, Jerry. Just tell me who wrote it. And what it says.”

We were back in the office at Frank’s home in Pasadena. It was a chilly, rainswept evening. Across the street, I could see one of his neighbors putting out the trash.

“It wasn’t written by the Greeks.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“Somebody came through a long time ago. Two thousand years or so. They left the message. Apparently they wrote it in Greek because it must have looked like their best chance to leave something we’d be able to read. Assuming we ever reached the Moon.”

“So what did it say?”

“It’s a warning.”

The creases in Frank’s forehead deepened. “Is the sun going unstable?”

“No.” I looked down at the translation. “It says that no civilization, anywhere, has been known to survive the advance of technology.”

Frank stared at me. “Say that again.”

“They all collapse. They fight wars. Or they abolish individual death, which apparently guarantees stagnation and an exit. I don’t know. They don’t specify.

“Sometimes the civilizations become too vulnerable to criminals. Or the inhabitants become too dependent on the technology and lose whatever virtue they might have had. Anyway, the message says that no technological civilization, anywhere, has been known to get old. Nothing lasts more than a few centuries—our centuries—once technological advancement begins. Which for us maybe starts with the invention of the printing press.

“The oldest known civilization lasted less than a thousand years.”