The Lure (41 page)

She rolls over on to her stomach. ‘Actually, I think Vashislav enjoys being on a permanent high.’

‘He and I intend to meet up for a game of chess.’

‘In Moscow?’

‘In Stockholm.’

‘What about you?’ Freya asks. ‘How did you get away after Roland’s Café?’

‘The American Embassy again. Vashislav and I must have gone through the same chain of reasoning. They kept me in a flat in Lodz for three weeks.’

‘Who did?’

‘Two Americans, Amos and Obadiah. I never knew their real names, never knew whether they’d turn out to be my friends or my executioners.’

‘That must have been like waiting on Death Row.’

Petrie nods. ‘It seems they’re experts in exfiltration, that’s to say, getting people like me out of hostile countries. And that, Dr Freya Størmer, leaves you. I loved your phony e-mails.’

Freya tickles Petrie’s nipple with a strand of her hair. ‘You knew they were phony? I wondered if you’d pick up my subtext. My message inside the message.’

‘It was obvious just as soon as you said you were heading for Svalbard. Vashislav’s friend is in Murmansk. Don’t do that. Where were you actually?’

‘Prague. Unur has a friend who has a cousin. I just stayed put for two weeks, looking up the internet for bad places to lead them and firing off false e-mails to you. Melanie told me I even fooled the CIA. They chased my electronic shadow over half of Europe. Then the real me flew to Paris with Unur’s money while my virtual self was somewhere around Trondheim. After that it was Mexico City, then here.’ Freya throws off the bedcovers and unwraps the wire round the champagne cork. The ice in the bucket has melted. She says, ‘Vashislav and Svetlana are in Moscow, briefing everyone.’

‘I heard. And Charlie’s in London. They’re holding a Guildhall reception for him around now.’

Freya smiles. ‘Charlie Gibson, hero of science. The man who picked up the alien signal. I can feel his glow all the way from London.’

The cork pops gently.

Petrie asks, casually, ‘By the way, Freya, did you really spread copies of the disks around?’

She gives Petrie a sly grin. ‘That’s for me to know and you to ponder.’

The last time Petrie had stared at a ceiling, it had swarmed with patterns which almost drove him mad. And now, almost against his will, the patterns are beginning to re-form. ‘The bulk of the signal defeated me. Remember you asked about their poetry? Their art? Could it be there’s nothing analytical in there? That it’s some form of art – digital art, maybe, affecting them in a way we couldn’t connect with, any more than a dog could understand jazz?’

‘But what if the machines have replaced organic life? Could a machine enjoy jazz? Or poetry? Or sex?’ Freya asks mischievously.

But already Petrie’s restless mind is elsewhere. He is fantasising about his resignation letter. Something along the lines of
Dear Professor Kavanagh, The Institute has become something remote and unreal to me, like Ruritania. Your Department is provincial and your preoccupations are petty. My office is cramped, dismal and dull, much like you. I believe it’s time for me to acquire a larger office, wherein I can deal with large affairs and high concepts. Time to become a high priest, an interpreter of the sacred text. My resignation is immediate and I will not require a reference. Yours, Petrie.

In the distance, the faint wail of a police siren, just reaching the top floor of the Willard and penetrating the double glazing.

‘Freya, I’m staying here. They’ve asked me to join the Mountain View team.’ Casually: ‘I don’t suppose you…’

‘Tom, I’d love to. But Olaf will have to join me.’

‘Olaf?’

‘My best and closest friend. Surely I’ve told you about him? On cold Arctic nights he’s better than an electric blanket.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Petrie experiences a dreadful sinking feeling.

Freya bursts out laughing. ‘My dog, stupid!’

She fills the thin glasses and wriggles back into bed, holding them. Some of the champagne overflows and fizzes down a breast. She giggles and looks at Petrie expectantly, eyebrows raised.

Petrie sighs. He has read somewhere that Eskimos do this sort of thing all winter.

*   *   *

In the SETI Institute in California, jubilation over the announcement that an ET signal had been received was mixed in with a very natural human reaction: glumness that others had got there first. But government funding, long denied it by a myopic Congress, suddenly began to flow in. A cryptanalysis team was set up with links to parallel groups in Washington, Moscow, two centres in Europe and the United Kingdom.

There was a debate as to whether the long-running radio search should continue. One group argued that the Galactic club saw radio as too primitive. Presumably somewhere down the line humanity would, with help, develop the science and technology needed to make the return phone call. A second group argued that there were too many imponderables in that argument. There was also an unspoken consideration: too much had been invested in the radio search to stop now. The second group prevailed, and the radio search continued. But there was a pervasive, depressing feeling that it was all a waste of time.

Once the United Nations had sent its answering message, through the huge Jodrell Bank paraboloid in the Cheshire countryside, the location of the signal became public domain. Nobody expected a reply for years, perhaps centuries: only crazy people believed Petrie’s idea about the Oort cloud.

Four months later, on a balmy summer’s evening in California, the receivers at the Institute were flooded with microwave signals of incredible power. They spanned a broad range of frequencies and the computers were quickly saturated. Almost as astonishing as the signal was the fact that it was coming from a totally unexpected point in the sky, near the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy.

Humanity had joined the club, and the SETI Institute got its reward after all.

From the
New York Times,
12 January:

We Are Not Alone

SIGNAL FROM ALIENS

Scientists huddled behind closed doors in a secret location in the former Czechoslovakia have received a message from aliens. This sensational announcement was made to a packed plenary session of the United Nations by David Garcia Alvarez, the Secretary General, who opened the proceedings with the historic words ‘We are not alone.’

A BRITISH TRIUMPH

A brief burst of high-energy atomic particles, detected on 3 January in an underground, British-run laboratory in a secret cave in a remote mountain range known as the Tatras in Eastern Europe, was found to contain an intelligent pattern. Decipherment of the pattern revealed that complex information, centuries ahead of present-day science, was being transmitted to Earth. Until this momentous event the laboratory had operated for twelve years without detecting a single exotic particle.

President Bull interrupted a vacation weekend in Camp David to telephone his congratulations to the scientists and invite them to the States. He has called for a full discussion between politicians, academics, scientists and the general public on the implications of this event. The signal, recorded on an ordinary CD, is at present with the National Security Agency and is being deciphered with the aid of specialists in many disciplines. A similar effort is underway at the British GCHQ and, reportedly, in Moscow. Tightlipped officials at NSA Headquarters revealed nothing about whether progress has been made in decipherment, and if so, what the message contains.

‘We are delighted that this fantastic discovery was made by a British facility,’ said Prime Minister Alan Edgeworth in the House of Commons this morning. Lord Sangster, Minister for Science, said, ‘Our warmest congratulations go to the team. Of course this finding, while made with a British facility, is made on behalf of all mankind, in keeping with agreed protocols and in the traditional spirit of scientific openness.’

A sour note was struck by Congressman Dan Shulman. ‘This is the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And I think the American people are entitled to know why, with the billions of dollars which this country pours into its scientific community, we were second fiddle to a shoestring outfit in Eastern Europe,’ said the 50-year-old Representative from Ohio.

But according to Professor Chris McCracken of Berkeley, ‘We can’t rule out that signals have already been sent to us and not recognised as intelligent. We laced a cubic kilometre of Arctic ice with light detectors five years ago and the experiment has been operating continuously since then. Many particles of uncertain origin have passed through the big ice cube. Some of them could have been from the aliens.’ McCracken admitted, however, that this was just speculation at the moment. ‘We will be re-analysing our data…’

NASA VINDICATED

‘The finding is an amazing event, but it had to happen sooner or later,’ said NASA Director Dan Tellman. ‘Put water and organics together and you have life. Planetary systems are extremely common and most of these, in the so-called habitable zone around stars, will have water. In these circumstances we expect life to evolve, and intelligence to develop, throughout the Galaxy. This is why NASA has directed so much energy into the exploration of Europa and Mars. NASA’s Origins program was designed specifically…’

RELIGIOUS LEADERS WELCOME FINDING

Religious leaders everywhere have welcomed the discovery. Speaking from his home in North Carolina, veteran evangelist Seth Logie said, ‘This illustrates the bountiful nature of God. How can we imagine that He would create a vast Universe and yet limit life to one small planet?’ Pope John declared …

SECRET LOCATION

A baffling feature of the signal is that it seems to have come from an empty region of sky. ‘This needn’t surprise us too much,’ said a spokesman from the Baltimore Space Telescope Institute. ‘Many stars are faint and distant. The Hubble telescope is already staring at one of the two possible celestial patches of sky from which the signal may have originated.’

The location of these patches will remain a closely guarded secret until a carefully formulated reply has been composed, agreed by and sent on behalf of the United Nations. To be understood, the message will have to be in the form of easily deciphered pictograms until a common language has been built up. Depending on the location of the signallers, it could take years or even centuries for the message to reach them. Already, however, a team of …

MYSTERY

The finding is touched with a drama worthy of the pages of fiction. The castle where the data were analysed, near the village of Smoleniçe in southern Slovakia, was destroyed by fire shortly after the analysis was complete. Two of the scientists, Dr Thomas Petrie, a twenty-nine-year-old British mathematician based in Dublin, and Dr Freya Størmer, an astronomer from Tromsø, Norway, had just left Slovakia to bring the news straight to the United Nations building. The three scientists remaining in the castle were rescued by the fire brigade. The Russians, Drs Vashislav Shtyrkov and Svetlana Popov, are currently in Moscow briefing the Russian authorities. Dr Charles Gibson, the team leader, is in London …

Postscript

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The question ‘Are we alone?’ is, at present, unanswered. Serious people deploy apparently sound arguments to reach opposite conclusions: these arguments, for and against, are given by the various fictional characters who populate
The Lure.

The Galaxy is ancient. If civilisations were common there would have been adequate time for them (or even one of them) to have spread everywhere, including here on Earth. But they are not here, nor do we see any sign of them elsewhere. Therefore we are alone. This is consistent with the stunningly improbable series of chemical flukes needed to create life from dead matter.

The Galaxy is vast, and teeming with stars. There may be a hundred planets for every human being, many of which will be Earth-like. Given the speed with which life took hold on Earth, its development in the right environments must be commonplace. Given the selective advantages of a central nervous system all the way to a brain, intelligence must be found everywhere in the Universe where conditions are right. Therefore the Universe is teeming with intelligent life.

Both arguments are persuasive, but they can’t both be right!

At present, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) beyond our solar system consists of a dozen or so independent programs spread around the globe. Strangely, nearly all of this funding is philanthropic, in spite of the fact that the question touches on some of the most profound issues of human existence (
here
). There are two types of search program, namely sky surveys and targeted searches. In a project funded by the Planetary Society and the SETI Institute, whole-sky data from the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico are routinely analysed by about four million computer owners worldwide, running a ‘screensaver’, background program. Another major sky survey, Project Argus, consists of about a thousand amateurs operating a number of small, ‘backyard’ radio-telescopes. Project Phoenix, on the other hand, uses the world’s largest radio telescopes. It is a targeted radio search, concentrating on about 1,000 nearby stars, that is within 155 light years of us. The project is well advanced, but so far it has met only the Great Silence.

Plans exist for a targeted search of 100,000 stars over an eight-year period. This may be a prelude to a search for signals from a million stars using the extremely powerful
SKA,
a square kilometre array of 500 to 1,000 radio telescopes yet to be built. Ultimately it is hoped to search a billion stars in the expectation of finding the strong, transient signal which will tell us that there are other sentient beings in the galactic wilderness.

These searches all take place at radio wavelengths. In recent years, however, a few searches involving small (again some almost backyard) optical telescopes have taken place for laser pulses coming from the nearest 1,000 or so stars. As we go to more and more energetic particles, more information can be packed into a signal of given duration. This leaves one with the nagging feeling that, maybe, civilisations a thousand or a million years older than ours may not communicate with such primitive devices as smoke signals, radio telescopes or lasers. It is true that the energy needed to send a signal increases pro rata with the energy of the carrier particle. However, the energy available at the start of the twentieth century was dwarfed by that available at its end (compare the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk with a Boeing 747), and it is reasonable to suppose that the huge energies required for particle beaming will be available to alien civilisations.