Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show by Edmund R. Schubert Page B

anyway.
    He opened the hatch and came in. “Look at these.” He shoved a handful of eight-by-ten photos in front of my face.
    I took the photos and began leafing through them. They showed a thin sunlit crescent of planet, which I assumed to be Aurora, the planet with the good atmosphere. “So, it’s nighttime on half the planet. Excuse me while I call my editor and tell him to stop the presses.”
    “No, look closer at the nighttime side. Over here.” He pointed to a region along the equator near the edge of the darkness.
    Peering at the photo, I noticed that there were a dozen or so little clumps of bright spots. “You think these are the lights of cities?”
    “Yes. There’s a civilization on that planet. And I want you to remember I came to you with this discovery first.”
    I looked over at the column I had just finished. I could rewrite a bit to mention Singh’s speculations, with plenty of caveats. But it still seemed a little too flimsy—and the whole situation with the Midnight Observer story made me leery of anything involving aliens. “Yeah, I’ll remember, if it turns out to be anything. It’s probably volcanoes or forest fires or something. Did you run this by Khadil?” Iqrit Khadil was our geologist. “I mean, if it’s really a civilization down there, how come there’s no radio traffic?”
    “Maybe they haven’t developed radio yet. Or maybe they’ve moved beyond it. But I’m telling you, this is it: a sentient species with at least rudimentary civilization.”
    “Look, if you can get Khadil to agree that those are not volcanoes or any other geological phenomenon within the next half hour, I’ll put your speculations in today’s column. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait till next week, which might be better anyway, since by then there might be more evidence one way or the other.”
    He grabbed the photos back. “I know what I know. I’ll talk to Khadil.”
    Now that the Starfarer is out of hyperspace, normal radio transmissions would take over one hundred and thirty years to travel to Earth, making direct two-way communication impossible. So the Starfarer’ s designers came up with a solution. When we arrived in this solar system, our ship split into two modules. The Hyperspace Module (HM) and two members of the crew remain in the outer system, where they can make the jump to hyperspace, while the Orbital Module (OM) heads in toward the planets with the rest of the crew. We send all our data—including this column—to the HM.
    It takes six days for the nuclear reactor on the HM to store enough power in the capacitors for the jump to hyperspace. So once a week, they make the jump and send a radio signal to a ship in hyperspace near Earth. Instead of one hundred and thirty years, the signal only takes eighteen hours to travel to Earth. The receiving ship then returns to normal space and transmits the data to UNSA headquarters on Earth, which sends my columns to the Washington Post, who delivers them to your doorstep.
    By the time the OM reached planetary orbit five days later, all the evidence pointed to a developing civilization on Aurora, so I decided it was a good thing I’d included Singh’s speculations in my column. We didn’t know what the reaction from Earth was yet—the HM was still charging its capacitors for its weekly jump into hyperspace to transmit our reports and download communications from home. But first contact with an alien species, which had always been considered only a slight possibility, transformed our mission from one of simple exploration into something far greater. I’d already written and rewritten and discarded several columns about the meaning of all this. It was probably the biggest news story ever; I was writing history, and I wanted to get the words right.
    I wasn’t the only one. Commander Inez Gutierrez de la Peña, who was in overall command of our mission, commed me in my quarters in the middle of the night. The next morning most of the crew