Emprise (4 page)

His bicycle leaning against the back wall of the SKYNET control room, Eddington waited in the half-lit chamber for Cassiopeia to climb above the horizon. The receiver and recorder—tape only, regrettably—were warmed up and ready, and Eddington was impatient to be done and get out. Judicious use of a pin had guaranteed that the meter registering power demand at the base would show no unexpected surges, but he did not want to count on that; eventually someone would note his handiwork and wonder.

Eddington had preprogrammed the coordinates into the tracking computer, and now he asked the computer to find them. Outside, the great white dish stirred, breaking loose from the neutral position with a squeal that would have alarmed Eddington had he heard it. When nothing but low-grade scruff appeared at the given frequency, Eddington took manual control, walking the dish in a slowly widening circle until, at last, the needles surged and the scope came alive with toothlike green lines. He sat watching, shaking his head in amazement, for a full minute before he thought to start the recorder turning.

The guard at the gate let him pass out without question, as he was no later than he occasionally had been due to extra work. As he pedaled toward Cambridge and Crown House, his heart pounded not with exertion but with excitement. Though it seemed that Chandliss would never know it, he had been right. The source, which Eddington impulsively dubbed AC-1 in memory of its discoverer, was not natural—could not be natural. No natural source that powerful could have been overlooked, and yet the signature of the emission was unlike that of Tycho’s Star or that of any equally powerful radio source Eddington knew of in that part of the sky. Or in any part, for that matter.

What he would do with the reel of tape tucked fiercely under his arm, he did not know. But he was now convinced that something did need to be done.

When the knock came, Eddington nearly leaped out of the foyer chair to answer it. Cracking open the door, he admitted a gust of wind and a woman’s hand, the latter thrusting a square of stiff white paper at him.

Eddington needed only a glance at the paper to recognize it as one of the invitations he had sent out:

Laurence Eddington requests the honor of your presence at an informal SETI party.
Significant developments in this area will be explored
April 30, 7:00 P.M.
Crown House.

He flung the door open. “Jeri,” he cried with pleasure. “I’m delighted.”

“I didn’t want to spoil my reputation as a party girl,” said Dr. Jeri Anofi as she stepped inside. Eddington laughed politely, trying unsuccessfully to see her as the bright, attractive thirty-year-old she had been when he came to Mullard. She was still attractive, but the standards at nearly fifty are not those at thirty, and the vivacious voice clashed somehow with the body which housed it. “Where is everyone?”

“You’re the first to arrive.”

“Um. I think I’ll stay near the door—I remember the way you used to look at me.” But she moved past him and into the small parlor. ‘Tell me, what did you tell the engraver SETI meant?” she called over her shoulder.

“Nothing—because he didn’t inquire, which is how it should be. But I was ready.”

“With what?”

“Sexual Empathy and Touching Interaction.” He smiled. “Sounds very American, don’t you think?”

“Just so you don’t try to turn it into that.” But her smile was friendly.

A few minutes later they opened the door to a red-faced and breathless Dr. Marc Aikens. “What have you been up to?” Eddington asked, peering into the darkness behind the taller man.

Aikens gestured aimlessly with his hand. “I don’t know—when I started thinking about what this might be, I simply felt like running. I hope you won’t disappoint me, Eddington.”

“I don’t think I will.” Eddington restrained an automatic “sir”; Aikens had been chairman of the Old School astronomy department during Eddington’s undergraduate years. The thought of the dignified Aikens running in glee wrinkled Eddington’s face with suppressed amusement.

Aikens’s jacket had scarcely stopped swinging in the closet when there was another knock. This time it was Terence Winston, one-time associate director of the Goobang Valley observatory in Australia. Winston was a round, dour little man, and he greeted Aikens and Anofi perfunctorily, as though he had passed the last evening with them and been bored.

Aikens and Anofi settled near each other in the parlor and began to catch up on personal history, while Winston sought out and located the small portable bar. Eddington continued to wait in the foyer, impatiently looking down the long walk for any sign of other guests. The sounds of ice against glass and Anofi’s laughter drifted out to him.

Twenty minutes passed, and then Anofi joined him there. “Anyone else coming?”

“Not that I can see,” Eddington said with a sigh.

“Perhaps we’d better get started, then.” Eddington nodded and followed her into the parlor. “How many invitations did you send out?”

“Seventy,” he said glumly. “Everyone I could remember from Mullard, all the top people from Jodrell Bank—”

“All things considered, perhaps this should be viewed as a good response,” Aikens said gently. “What do you have for us?”

“No long explanations are necessary.” Eddington walked to the stereo cabinet, swung open the doors, and switched on the tape deck. “This was received in the 19-centimetre band from the direction of Cassiopeia.”

The room was filled with a chirping electronic duet accompanied by a background symphony of static. Having heard it a dozen times already, Eddington watched their faces. Anofi sat forward and listened intently, her head tilted and the corner of her mouth curled in the beginning of a smile. Winston looked at his hands, calmly picking at the dirt under his fingernails, his face as impassive as ever. Aikens gazed dreamily at the ceiling, rubbing absently at the bristly gray growth on his upper Up.

When he heard a sequence that sounded vaguely like the “One-Note Samba,” Eddington turned off the tape and looked expectantly at his visitors.

“Did you make that recording?” asked Aikens.

“Yes.”

“And the conditions were good?”

“Yes.”

“No chance of it being an interference pattern?”

Eddington opened his mouth to say that Allen Chandliss had received the same signal in the United States, but somehow all that came out was, “In my judgment, no.”

“Don’t you think that might be jumping to conclusions?” Winston asked. “What observatory were they kind enough to open up for you, Larry?”

“The equipment was adequate,” Eddington said. “Where doesn’t matter.”

“He may have a point,” Aikens began.

“It was the SKYNET dish at Duxford. The equipment was up to it. Does that mean you think I’m not?”

“Of course not. I’m simply trying not to leap to conclusions. It’s bloody hard, too, when I want you to be right.” He sniffed and shook his head. “SETI. Where are the charts?”

“I haven’t any.”

“Good lord, lad, didn’t you think ahead? We’ll need them. There’s not much we can do with that,” Aikens said, gesturing toward the tape deck.

“Do?” Winston sat forward. “I don’t see what there is to do, with or without charts.”

“Simpleton. If it’s a beacon, it’s bound to contain information in some coded format,” Anofi said impatiently. “The charts will help us find the patterns. Lord knows it’s going to be hard enough. Frank proved that with his sample message back in ’73.”

“Frank? What message?” Eddington asked. “I don’t recall the story.”

“Frank Drake—an American. I don’t think he came to Mullard any time you were there. He came up with an idea for a picture message using binary numbers—here, give me a piece of paper.”

She quickly scrawled a line of numbers: 0010‌0001‌0011‌1110‌0100‌0010‌000100. “See anything in that?”

“Wait a minute—is this what you called a Drake picture?” he said to Aikens. “How many characters—ten… thirty. Give me the paper. Let’s see—this could be a 2 x 15, a 3 x 10—let’s try 5 x 6.”

On the paper, he wrote:

00100
00100
11111
00100
00100
00100

“A cross,” he pronounced.

“Right. Drake’s message was quite a bit more complex, but the point is, that code was devised by a human and distributed to another group of humans that knew Drake well and were very bright to boot—and only one, Barney Oliver, figured it out. In other words, the message was not only from the same planet, but from the same species, social group, and education level. Assuming that that”—she pointed at the reel of tape—“is what I hope it is, we’ve got quite a task facing us.”

Aikens crossed the room and plucked the reel of tape from the machine. “You did think far enough ahead to duplicate this?”

“Yes,” said Eddington.

“I’ll get charts made.”

“How?”

He dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. “I’ll need about a week. Meet here again Tuesday?” Ti l be here,” Anofi said quickly. ‘Terence?” Winston struggled to his feet. “I’ll be here. But don’t think for a minute I believe one word of this!” he said, waggling a finger at them. “It just happens to be more interesting than what I usually do on Tuesdays.” He stumped out of the room.

And that was all. When the others had left, Eddington wandered from room to room, feeling as though be had been cheated. There had been so little acclaim over his achievement in getting the tape, and then Aikens making as though to take over, that for a moment Eddington regretted having told them. Nor did he appreciate Winston’s gruff skepticism. Only Jeri had seemed to share Eddington’s own spirit, and that was muted by the others’ reserve.

But Aikens was right, damnably. Without the charts of intensity over time, all they had open to them was wild speculation. And, he realized, their excitement over the anomaly may have been momentarily overwhelmed by something stronger—their yearning to get back to work.

Warmer weather had permitted the reopening of Crown House, and the members of the AC-1 committee were just settling around the enormous cherrywood table in its main dining hall when they heard knocking. It was remote and rapid, and a moment later the nearby sound of a bell startled them.

“Ah, good. That’s the bell pull at the main door,” said Eddington. “Stay here. I’ll see to it.”

Eddington was gone for several minutes, and when he was heard returning, his footsteps were confused with those of a second person. Winston glanced nervously at the others.

“And now we are five,” Eddington said as he reentered the room, trailed by a taller man with a close-clipped beard. “Does anyone need an introduction to Dr. Schmidt?”

Aikens set down his pipe and bounded across the room. “Josef, Josef,” he said fervently, pumping the newcomer’s hand. “So good to see you. How did you know? Or did you?”

“I called him,” said Anofi. “You know me—can’t keep a secret. Hi, Josef.” Schmidt seemed embarrassed by the attention. “Thank you, Marc. I’m just sorry I couldn’t be here for the first party.”

“That’s all right,” said Winston from the far end of the table. “We had nothing, did nothing, and got nowhere.”

“Don’t mind Terry,” said Anofi. “He’s still among the skeptics.”

“Which you would be, too, my dear—had your brain not softened from lack of use these past years.” Schmidt chuckled. “Still true to the Old School English manners, eh, Terence?”

“Of course. How are things in Germany, Doctor?”

Schmidt waved his hand and settled into a chair. “Not ‘doctor,’ please. I’m just plain Josef Schmidt, reading teacher for children of the terminally erudite.”

There was polite laughter, but true mirth was reigned in by the thought of the last director of the European Space Administration’s astronomical research office tutoring to earn a living.

“Laurence, here, was just telling us how he came across this emission,” Aikens said, opening a briefcase and producing a sheaf of computer paper. “Apparently Allen Chandliss in America put him on to it. Last week we listened to the tape that Laurence made,” he said for Schmidt’s benefit. “It’s not much to hear—not a Bach chorale at all—but in its own way entrancing.”

He separated the papers into four groups and distributed. “These were done for us at Cambridge—even though I’ve been dismissed, a few friends in the soft sciences are still there. I only received them this morn, and haven’t had much of a chance to look them over. Still—”

He stopped short at the sound of knocking. “Now what? Isn’t this everyone?”

“It should have been,” Eddington said, rising. “Perhaps you should get those out of sight.”

“You are having problems with the police here as well?” Schmidt asked.

“What would they do?” Anofi asked, her face betraying a touch of anxiety. “We’ve done nothing illegal, have we?”

“It’s difficult to know, these days,” Aikens said soberly.

But no alarm was called for. The person at the door was Eddington’s daughter, plus luggage, minus mother.

“Hello, Penny,” he said, momentarily taken aback. Then he remembered—“your turn coming up”—and recovered before his confusion showed. “It’s good to see you again.”

“I’m not Penny,” the girl said haughtily. “That’s a stupid name.”

Eddington blinked. “Have we changed our name, then?”

“Yes. You can call me Agatha.”

Eddington bit back a smile. “Reading a lot of mysteries,” Maggie had said. Too many! “Agatha. Well, Agatha, step inside.” When he tried to take her bags, she insisted on carrying the larger one. “I already put my bike in the carriage house,” she said proudly.

“Yes, you’ll need that for going to school, won’t you? Have you decided what bedroom you’d like to sleep in this time?”

Agatha considered—a slight, gawky child’s figure with the serious face of an adult. “Which is the one where Great-Aunt Liz murdered Uncle George?”

This time the smile snuck past Eddington’s defences. “That’s the Garden Room—the big one at the top of the stairs.”

“That’s right. That’s the one.” Taking her suitcase in hand, she struggled toward the stairs. Eddington followed with the other bag.

Swinging the bags onto the bed raised a small cloud of dust, and Eddington met Agatha’s intense look with an apologetic shrug. “I have some people downstairs that I need to get back to. Is there anything you’ll need tonight—besides a dust rag?”

“I’ll clean up tomorrow,” she said. “Go on—go back to your friends.”

“All right.” He hesitated at the door. “You won’t bother us now, will you?”

Her sigh was exasperated. “I’m not five, Dad.”

“There’s a good girl. I’ll see you in the morning.” He left feeling awkward, as he usually did the first few days. Part of being a forty-four-year-old father to a twelve-year-old daughter, he supposed.

Agatha set aside the two suitcases and flung the quilted comforter to the foot of the bed. When she unlatched the larger case, she revealed a jumble of books, for the most part paperbacks and generally worn in appearance. Pulling one out, she bounced onto the wide bed and snuggled back into the pillows.

/ like it here
, she thought, surveying the room.
So much history in old houses—and a murder, in this very room. Just a simple crime of passion, of course—but you never know what I might find elsewhere. To think that I’ve never really explored this house!
Surrounding herself with pillows, she began to read. But after a few pages, she set the book aside.
I wonder who’s downstairs?
she thought.

Retrieving a notebook and pen from her smaller case, Agatha made her way downstairs. She circled the dining hall, seeking a spot from which she could see and hear without being noticed. The library seemed to provide what she wanted; it shared a wall and a door with the dining hall, but most important, it shared a large heating vent. Seated on the floor at the grating, she could see the better part of the room.

“Before we go any farther I want to hear that we are in agreement on this,” her father was saying. “That this is not a natural phenomenon—that it may not be meant for us, but that it is of intelligent origin. If you don’t believe that, I’m not sure you should be here.”