Timescape (22 page)

Gordon had noticed lately that Cooper now confined himself to taking the data and venturing no opinions. Perhaps the clash with Lakin had taught him that an agnostic posture was safer. Cooper seemed happy enough when he was getting conventional resonance signals; they were the field stones which would build his thesis.

"This earlier stuff–RA and DEC." Gordon stroked his chin. "Something astronomical about that ..."

"Ummmm," Cooper volunteered. "Maybe so."

"Yes. Right Ascension and Declination. These are coordinates, fixing a point in space."

"Huh. Could be."

Gordon glanced at Cooper irritably. There was such a thing as playing cards too close to your vest. "Look, I want to look into this. Just keep on taking measurements."

Cooper nodded and turned away, obviously relieved to be rid of the perplexing data. Gordon left the lab and went up two floors to 317, Bernard Carroway's office. There was no answer to his knock. He went by the department office, leaned in and called, "Joyce, where is Dr.

Carroway?" By convention, office personnel were called by their first names, while faculty always had a title. Gordon had always felt slightly uncomfortable about going along with the practice.

"The big one or the little one?" the dark-haired department secretary said, raising her eyebrows; she scarcely ever let them rest.

"Big one. In mass, not height."

"Astrophysics seminar. It should be nearly over."

He slipped quietly into the seminar as John Boyle was finishing a lecture; the green blackboards were covered with differential equations from Boyle's new gravitation theory. Boyle finished with a flourish, mixing in a Scotsman's joke, and the seminar broke up into rivulets of conversation. Bernard Carroway heaved himself up and led a discussion between Boyle and a third man Gordon didn't know.

He leaned over and asked Bob Gould, "Who's that?" Gordon nodded at the tall, curly-haired man.

"Him? Saul Shriffer, from Yale. He and Frank Drake did that Project Ozma thing, listening for radio signals from other civilizations."

"Oh." Gordon leaned back and watched Shriffer argue with Boyle over a technical point. He felt a humming energy in himself, the scent of the hunt. He had put aside the whole matter of the messages for several months, in the face of Lakin's indifference and the disappearance of the effect. But now it was back and he was suddenly sure he should press the issue.

Boyle and Shriffer were arguing over the validity of an approximation John had made to simplify an equation. Gordon watched with interest. It wasn't a cool intellectual discourse between men of reason, as the layman so often pictured. It was a warming argument, with muted shouts and gestures. They were arguing over ideas, but beneath the surface personalities clashed. Shriffer was much the noisier of the two. He pressed down hard with the chalk, snapping it in two. He flapped his arms, shrugged, frowned. He wrote and talked rapidly, frequently refuting what he himself had been saying only moments before. He made careless mistakes in the calculation, repairing them as he went with swipes of an eraser. The trivial errors weren't important–he was trying to capture the essence of the problem. The exact solution could come later. His hasty scrawl covered the board.

Boyle was totally different. He spoke with an even, almost monotonous voice, in contrast to the quick, jabbing tone Gordon remembered from the Limehouse. This was his scientific persona. Occasionally his voice was pitched so low Gordon had to strain to hear him. Those nearby would have to stop their side-talk to listen–a neat tactic to insure their attention. He never interrupted Shriffer. He began his sentences with "I think if we try this ..." or "Saul, don't you see what will happen if ..." A form of oneupmanship. He never made a forceful, positive assertion; he was the dispassionate seeker of truth. But gradually the effort of sticking to this low-key role showed. He couldn't prove rigorously that his approximation was justified, so he was reduced to a holding action. In sum his approach amounted to a repeated invitation to "prove that I'm wrong." Gradually, his voice rose. His face tightened into stubbornness. Suddenly Saul claimed he knew how to refute John's approximation. His idea was to solve a particularly simple test problem where they already knew what the answer should be. Saul zoomed through the calculation. Only for one narrow range of physical conditions did the approximation give the right answer. "There! See it's no good."

John shook his head. "Bugger off–it works precisely for the most interesting case."

Saul seethed. "Nonsense! You've thrown all the long wave lengths out of the problem."

But heads nodded around them. John had won. Since the embattled approximation was not totally useless, it was acceptable. Saul grudgingly agreed and a moment later was smiling and discussing something else, the issue forgotten. There was no point in remaining excited about an issue where something could be proved. Gordon grinned. It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. He approached Carroway and held out the coordinates from his message. "Bernard, do you have any idea where this is in the sky?" Carroway blinked owlishly at the numbers. "No, no, I never remember such details. Saul?" He pointed at the paper.

"Near Vega," Saul said. "I'll look it up for you, if you want."

After his lecture on Classical Electrodynamics Gordon intended to search out Saul Shriffer, but when he dropped by his office to leave off his lecture notes someone was waiting. It was Ramsey, the chemist. "Say, thought I'd zip by and update you," Ramsey said. "I looked into that little riddle you gave me."

"Oh?"

"I think there's some real meat there. We're a long way from understanding much about long-chain molecules, y'know, but I'm interested in that puzzle. The part where it says, 'enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host.' That sounds like a self-replicating mechanism we don't know beans about."

"Does that happen with the molecular forms you know?"

Ramsey's brow wrinkled. "Nope. But I've been studying the special fertilizing forms some of the companies are experimenting with, and ...

well, it's too early to say. Just a hunch, really. What I came to tell you is that I haven't forgotten about the thing. Classes and my regular grants, y'know–they stack up on you. But I'll keep nudging along at it. Might go down and bug Walter Munk about the oceanography connection.

Anyway–" he stood, giving a mock salute of goodbye– "I appreciate the info. Might be a good lead. Gratz a lots."

"Huh?"

"Gratz–gracias. Spanish."

"Oh. Sure." The cavalier Californian appropriation of Spanish slang seemed apt for Ramsey. Yet beneath the used-car salesman manner a quick mind worked. Gordon was glad the man was looking into the first message and hadn't let it fall into a crack. This seemed to be a lucky day; threads were weaving together. Yes, a lucky day. "I'd give it an A plus so far," Gordon mused to himself, and went looking for Shriffer.

"I nailed it for you," Saul said decisively, finger arrowing down at a speck on a star chart. "It's a point very close to a normal F7 star, named 99 Hercules."

"But not smack on it?"

"No, but very close. What's behind all this, anyway? What's a solid state physicist need a star position for?"

Gordon told him about the persistent signals and showed him Cooper's recent decoding. Saul quickly became excited. He and a Russian, Kadarsky, were writing a paper together on the detection of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their operating assumption was that radio signals were the natural choice. But if Gordon's signals were indeed unexplainable in terms of earthly transmissions, Saul suggested, why not consider the hypothesis of extraterrestrial origin? The coordinates clearly pointed that way.

"See Right Ascension is 18 hours, 5 minutes, 36 seconds. Now, 99

Hercules is this dot at 18 hours, 5 minutes, 8 seconds, a little off.

Declination of your signal is 30 degrees, 29.2 minutes. That fits."

"So? They don't agree exactly."

"But they're damned close!" Saul waved his hands. "A few seconds difference is nothing."

"How in hell does an extraterrestrial know our system of astronomical measurements?" Gordon said skeptically.

"How do they know our language? By listening to our old radio programs, of course. Look–parallax for 99 Hercules is a 0.06. That means it's over sixteen parsecs away."

"What's that?"

"Oh, about 51 light years."

"How could they be signaling, then? Radio came in about sixty years ago. There hasn't been time for light to go the round trip–it would take over a century. So they can't be answering our own radio stations."

"True." Saul appeared momentarily deflated. "You say there's some more to the message?" He brightened. "Let me see."

After a moment he stabbed the printed message and exclaimed, "Right!

That's it. See this word?"

"Which?"

"Tachyon. Greek origin. Means 'fast one,' I'll bet. That means they're using some faster-than-light transmission."

"Oh, come on."

"Gordon, use your imagination. It fits, damn it!"

"Nothing travels faster than light."

"This message says something does."

"Crap. Just crap."

"Okay, how do you explain this? 'Shotfid appear as point source in tachyon spectrum 263 KEV peak.' KEV–kilovolts. They're using tachyons, whatever they are, of energy 263 kilovolts."

"Doubtful," Gordon said severely.

"What about the rest? 'Can verify with NMR directionality.

Measurement follows.' NMR–Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Then garbage, a few more words, then garbage again. SMISSION FROM 19BD

1998COORGHQE and so on."

"Not all garbage. See the rest is simple dots and dashes."

"Hummm." Saul peered at the pattern. "Interesting."

"Look, Saul, I appreciate the–"

"Wait a sec. 99 Hercules isn't just any star, you know. I looked it up. It fits into the kind of star class we think might support life."

Gordon pursed his lips and looked dubious. "Right, it's an F7. Slightly heavier than our sun–more massive, I mean–and with a big region around it capable of supporting life. It's a binary star–wait, wait, I know what you're going to say," Saul said dramatically, pushing his open, upright palm toward Gordon, who had no idea what he was going to say. "Binary stars can't have livable planets around them, right?"

"Uh, why not?"

"Because the planets get perturbed. Only 99 Hercules doesn't have that problem. The two stars circle each other only every 54.7 years. They're far apart, with livable spaces around each of them."

"Both are F7s?"

"As far as we can tell, the bigger one is. You only need one," he added lamely.

Gordon shook his head. "Saul, I appreciate— "

"Gordon, let me have a look at that message. The dots and dashes, I mean."

"Sure, okay."

"Do me a favor. I think there's something big here. Maybe our ideas about radio communication and the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen being the natural choice maybe they're all wrong. I want to check this message of yours out. Just don't make up your mind. Okay?"

"Okay," Gordon said reluctantly.

When Gordon lugged his briefcase into his office the next morning, Saul was waiting for him. The sight of Saul's eager face, with brown eyes that danced as he spoke, filled him with a premonition.

"I cracked it," Saul said tersely. "The message."

"What ... ?"

"The dots and dashes at the end? That spelled no words? They aren't words–they're a picture!"

Gordon gave him a skeptical look and put down his briefcase.

"I counted the dashes in that long transmission. 'Noise,' you said. There were 1537 dashes."

"So?"

"Frank Drake and I and a lot of other people have been thinking of ways to transfer pictures by simple on-off signals. It's simple: send a rectangular grid."

"That scrambled part of the message? RECTANGULAR

CO-ORDMZAL$ and so on."

"Correct. To lay out a grid you need to know how many lines to take on each axis. I tried a bunch of combinations that multiply out to 1537. All gave a mess, except a 29-by-53 grid. Laying the dashes out on that scheme gave a picture. And 29 and 53 are both prime numbers–the obvious choice, when you think about it. There is only that one way to break 1537

down into a product of primes."

"Ummm. Very clever. And this is the picture?"

Saul handed Gordon a sheet of graph paper with a point filled in for each dash in the transmission. It showed a complex interweaving set of curves moving from right to left. Each curve was made of clusters of dots, arranged in a regular but complicated pattern. "What is it?" Gordon asked.

"I don't know. All the practice problems Frank and I made up gave pictures showing solar systems, with one planet picked out–things like that. This one doesn't look anything like that."

Gordon tossed the drawing on his desk. "Then what use is it?"

"Well–hell! An immense amount of good, once we figure it out."

"Well..."

"What's the matter? You think this is wrong?"

"Saul I know you've got a reputation for thinking about–what's that Hermann Kahn calls it?–the unthinkable. But this–"

"You think I'm making all this up?"

"Me? Me? Saul, I detected this message. I showed it to you. But your explanation–! Faster-than-light telegraph signals from another star. But the coordinates don't quite fit! A picture coming out of the noise. But the picture makes no sense! Come on, Saul."

Saul's face reddened and he stepped back, hands on hips. "You're blind, you know that? Blind."

"Let's say ... skeptical."

"Gordon, you're not giving me a break."

"Break? I admit you've got some sort of case. But until we understand that picture of yours, it doesn't hold water."

"Okay. O-kay," Saul said dramatically, smacking a fist into his left palm.

"I'll find out what that drawing means. We'll have to go to the whole academic community to solve the riddle."

"What's that mean?"