Staring down at the strange satellite, Paolo
Marcillon ran through magnetic scans and while there was curious blip over the
surface at 9 Tesla, the level typically used for MRIs in hospitals, but that
was all. There wasn’t anything else he could do, though possibly...He tried a
sonar pulse and fell backward, stunned, blind, and deaf.
He woke with a pounding headache, staring into the noon
Sun. A bit less than half as bright as the Sun that would have blinded him from
Earth, it still made the pounding in his head worse. He slow-rolled: rocking
back and forth until he was able to get on his side. On his side, he could
wriggled until his arm was down and he could push himself up. Knees. Then stand
up. Panting, he finally stood looking down at the satellite.
He’d never heard of anything like it. Why would any
Earth satellite react to sonar? He bent to gently test the satellite’s weight.
He picked it up easily then cautiously moved toward the ‘bug. The thing might
have some sort of mass reduction, but that didn’t mean it’s inertia would have
been cancelled. In fact, he couldn’t make any assumptions about the thing.
Once inside, he set it down inside the airlock and
closed the inside door, evacuating the lock again. He unsealed his helmet and
popped off the upper torso and set it down, staring through the window at the
satellite. He closed pulled the shield over the window and went to the lab
station. Designed in the olden days to monitor and direct research studies,
most marsbugs still tipped their collective helmets to their science roots.
It still had a suite of equipment. He tapped the
viewscreens in the airlock to life. Six screens, floor to ceiling, one from
above, another one to roam. It also allowed for examination of an object or
objects in multiple perspectives as well as a variable frequencies.
He’d already done a simple scan with the limited
equipment of the suit. There was only the suit recorder, but it’s depth was
minimal. He started as he had before, though at the highest end of the
electromagnetic spectrum. The thing had been exposed to cosmic rays for however
long it had lain on the surface of Mars before he ran over it.
He laughed low, starting the visual record as well
as records spanning the EM spectrum: gamma rays sliding into X-rays through UV
into visible light. He got an odd spike at 550 nanometers what the Human eye recognized
as green light. For a moment, he thought
he saw faded writing. He backed the generator to 550 again. Markings leaped out
at him, incomprehensible but clearly intelligent. He left it for a while, then
ran the movable camera over as much of the visible surface as he could. He
could analyze it later.
Ramping it up again, he slid through infrared wave,
radio, and finally the lowest frequencies of radio. Sound waves required that
he poke around in the computer for a while before he finally found a program
that would generate sound at both frequency and decibel.
He set it up to start, watching carefully, hoping
that at whatever frequency the satellite had reflected back to him would be
deflected or absorbed by the walls of the airlock.
Beginning at ten Hertz, he set the program to vary
frequency in hundred Hz intervals first then increase decibels from zero to the
loudest sound ever recorded – the explosion of a thermonuclear device. After
the first blast, he toned it back. His suit hadn’t been able to make anything
even close to that amount of noise. He figured he could continue running it
from silence to a jack hammer at one meter. He barely heard that through the
lock.
He watched and listened as the frequency rose from
two thousand to twenty thousand Hz. No reaction. The pitch went up until he
heard nothing. The meter read thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and twelve Hz
when one of the screens blanked – the one closest to a rectangular marking he’d
seen at 550 nm. Logically, that might be the “nozzle” of the ultrasound “gun”.
But why did it have the ability to broadcast in the
ultrasonic in the first place. He set the chamber to 55o nm and 38,412 Hz or 38
kHz, slowing the recording rate of the overhead camera and fired again.
Staggering backwards, Paolo crumpled to the floor.
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