Jack McDevitt - Cryptic

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2024-11-19 2 0 54.34KB 14 页 5.9玖币

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Cryptic by Jack McDevitt

It was at the bottom of the safe in a bulky manila envelope. I nearly tossed it into the trash along

with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project.

Had it been cataloged, indexed in some way, I'm sure I would have. But the envelope was blank,

save for an eighteen-year-old date scrawled in the lower right hand corner, and beneath it, the

notation “40 gh.”

Out on the desert, lights were moving. That would be Brackett fine-tuning the Array for Orrin

Hopkins, who was then beginning the observations that would lead, several years later, to new

departures in pulsar theory. I envied Hopkins: he was short, round, bald, a man unsure of himself,

whose explanations were invariably interspersed with giggles. He was a ridiculous figure; yet he

bore the stamp of genius. And people would remember his ideas long after the residence hall

named for me at Carrollton had crumbled.

If I had not long since recognized my own limits and conceded any hope of immortality (at least

of this sort), I certainly did so when I accepted the director's position at Sandage. Administration

pays better than being an active physicist, but it is death to ambition.

And a Jesuit doesn't even get that advantage.

In those days, the Array was still modest: forty parabolic antennas, each thirty-six meters across.

They were on tracks, of course, independently movable, forming a truncated cross. They had, for

two decades, been the heart of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Now, with the

Project abandoned, they were being employed for more useful, if mundane, purposes.

* * * *

Even that relatively unsophisticated system was good: as Hutching Chaney once remarked, the

Array could pick up the cough of an automobile ignition on Mars.

I circled the desk and fell into the uncomfortable wooden chair we'd inherited from the outgoing

regime. The packet was sealed with tape that had become brittle and loose around the edges. I

tore it open.

It was a quarter past ten. I'd worked through my dinner and the evening hours, bored, drinking

coffee, debating the wisdom in coming out here from JPL. The increase in responsibility was a

good career move; but I knew now that Harry Cooke would never lay his hands on a new particle.

I was committed for two years at Sandage: two years of working out schedules and worrying

about insurance; two years of dividing meals between the installation's sterile cafeteria, and

Jimmy's Amoco Restaurant on Route 85. Then, if all went well, I could expect another move up,

perhaps to Georgetown.

I'd have traded it all for Hopkins's future.

I shook out six magnetic disks onto the desk. They were in individual sleeves, of the type that

many installations had once used to record electromagnetic radiation. The disks were numbered

and dated over a three-day period in 2001, two years earlier than the date on the envelope.

Each was marked “Procyon.”

In back, Hopkins and two associates were hunched over monitors. Brackett, having finished his

job, was at his desk reading.

I was pleased to discover that the disks were compatible to the Mark VIs. I inserted one, tied in a

vocorder to get a hard copy, and went over to join the Hopkins group while the thing ran. They

were talking about plasma. I listened for a time, got lost, noted that everyone around me (save the

grinning little round man) also got lost, and strolled back to my computer.

The trace drew its green-and-white pictures smoothly on the Mark VI display, and pages of hard

copy clicked out of the vocorder. Something in the needle geometry scattered across the

recording paper drew my attention. Like an elusive name, it drifted just beyond reach.

Beneath a plate of the Andromeda Galaxy, a coffee pot simmered. I could hear the distant drone

of a plane, probably out of Luke Air Force Base. Behind me, Hopkins and his men were laughing

at something.

There were patterns in the recording.

They materialized slowly, identical clusters of impulses: the signals were artificial.

Procyon.

The laughter, the plane, the coffee pot, a radio that had been left on somewhere: everything

squeezed down to a possibility.

More likely Phoenix, I thought.

* * * *

Frank Myers had been SETI Director since Ed Dickinson's death twelve years before. I reached

him next morning in San Francisco.

“No,” he said without hesitation. “Someone's idea of a joke, Harry.”

“It was in your safe, Frank.”

“That damned safe's been there forty years. Might be anything in it. Except messages from

Mars....”

I thanked him and hung up.

It had been a long night: I'd taken the hard copy to bed and, by 5:00 A.M., had identified more

than forty distinct pulse patterns. The signal appeared to be continuous: that is, it had been an

ongoing transmission with no indication of beginning or end, but only irregular breaches of the

type that would result from atmospherics and, of course, the long periods during which the target

would have been below the horizon.

It was clearly a reflected terrestrial transmission: radio waves bounce around considerably. But

why seal the error two years later and put it in the safe?

Procyon is a yellow-white class F3 binary, absolute magnitude 2.8, once worshipped in Babylon

and Egypt. (What hasn't been worshipped in Egypt?) Distance from earth: 11.3 light-years.

In the outer office, Beth Cooper typed, closed filing drawers, spoke with visitors.

The obvious course of action was to use the Array. Listen to Procyon at 40 gigahertz, or all

across the spectrum for that matter, and find out if it was, indeed, saying something.

On the intercom, I asked Beth if any open time had developed on the system. “No,” she said

crisply. “We have nothing until August of next year.”

That was no surprise. The facility had booked quickly when its resources were made available to

the astronomical community on more than the limited basis that had prevailed for twenty years.

Anyone wishing to use the radiotelescope had to plan far in advance. How could I get hold of the

Array for a couple hours?

I asked her to come into my office.

Beth Cooper had come to Sandage from San Augustin with SETI during the big move twenty

years before. She'd been secretary to three directors: Hutching Chaney, who had built Sandage;

his longtime friend, Ed Dickinson; and finally, after Dickinson's death, Frank Myers, a young

man on the move, who'd stayed too long with the Project, and who'd been reportedly happy to see

it strangled. In any case, Myers had contributed to its demise by his failure to defend it.

I'd felt he was right, of course, though for the wrong reason. It had been painful to see the

magnificent telescope at Sandage denied, by and large, to the scientific community while its

grotesque hunt for the Little Green Man signal went on. I think there were few of us not happy to

see it end.

Beth had expected to lose her job. But she knew her way around the facility, had a talent for

massaging egos, and could spell. A devout Lutheran, she had adapted cautiously to working for a

priest and, oddly, seemed to have taken offense that I did not routinely walk around with a

Roman collar.

I asked one or two questions about the billing methods of the local utilities, and then commented,

as casually as I could manage, that it was unfortunate the Project had not succeeded.

Beth looked more like a New York librarian than a secretary at a desert installation. Her hair was

silver-gray. She wore steel-rimmed glasses on a long silver chain. She was moderately heavy, but

her carriage and her diction were impeccable, imbuing her with the quality that stage people call

presence.

Her eyes narrowed to hard black beads at my remark. “Dr. Dickinson said any number of times

that none of us would live to see results. Everyone attached to the program, even the janitors,

knew that.” She wasn't a woman given to shrugs, but the sudden flick in those dark eyes matched

the effect. “I'm glad he didn't live to see it terminated.”

That was followed by an uncomfortable silence. “I don't blame you, Doctor,” she said at length,

referring to my public position that the facility was being underutilized.

I dropped my eyes and tried to smile reassuringly. It must have been ludicrous: her severe

features softened. I showed her the envelope.

“Do you recognize the writing?”

She barely glanced at it. “It's Dr. Dickinson's.”

“Are you sure? I didn't think Dickinson came to the Project until Hutch Chaney's retirement. That

was ‘13, wasn't it?”

“He took over as Director then. But he was an operating technician under Dr. Chaney for, oh, ten

or twelve years before that.” Her eyes glowed when she spoke of Dickinson.

“I never met him,” I said.

“He was a fine man.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, her features pale. “If we hadn't lost

him, we might not have lost the Project.”

“If it matters,” I added gently.

“If it matters.”

She was right about Dickinson: he was articulate, a persuasive speaker, author of books on

various subjects, and utterly dedicated to SETI. He might well have kept the Project afloat despite

the cessation of federal funds and the increasing clamor among his colleagues for more time at

the facility. But Dickinson was twelve years dead now: he'd returned to Massachusetts at

Christmas, as was his custom. After a snowstorm, he'd gone out to help shovel a neighbor's

driveway and his heart had failed.

At the time, I was at Georgetown. I can still recall my sense of a genius who had died too soon.

He had possessed a vast talent, but no discipline; he had churned through his career hurling

sparks in all directions. But somehow everything he touched, like SETI, had come to no

fulfillment.

“Beth, was there ever a time they thought they had an LGM?”

“The Little Green Man Signal?” She shook her head. “No, I don't think so. They were always

picking up echoes and things. But nothing ever came close. Either it was KCOX in Phoenix, or a

Japanese trawler in the middle of the Pacific.”

“Never anything that didn't fit those categories?”

One eyebrow rose slightly. “Never anything they could prove. If they couldn't pin it down, they

went back later and tried to find it again. One way or another, they eliminated everything.” Or,

she must be thinking, we wouldn't be standing here having this conversation.

* * * *

Beth's comments implied that suspect signals had been automatically stored. Grateful that I had

not yet got around to purging obsolete data, I discovered that was indeed the case, and ran a

search covering the entire time period back to the Procyon reception in 2011. I was looking for a

similar signal.

I got a surprise.

There was no match. There was also no record of the Procyon reception itself.

That meant presumably it had been accounted for and discarded.

Then why, two years later, had the recordings been sealed and placed in the safe? Surely no

explanation would have taken that long.

SETI had assumed that any LGM signal would be a deliberate attempt to communicate, that an

effort would therefore be made by the originator to create intelligibility, and that the logical way

to do that was to employ a set of symbols representing universal constants: the atomic weight of

hydrogen, perhaps, or the value of pi.

But the move to Sandage had also been a move to more sophisticated, and considerably more

sensitive, equipment. The possibility developed that the Project would pick up a slopover signal,

a transmission of alien origin, but intended only for local receivers. Traffic of that nature could be

immeasurably difficult to interpret.

If the packet in the safe was anything at all, it was surely of this latter type. Forty gigahertz is not

an ideal frequency for interstellar communication. Moreover, the intercept was ongoing,

formless, no numbered parts, nothing to assist translation.

I set the computer working on the text, using SETI's own language analysis program. Then I

instructed Brackett to call me if anything developed, had dinner at Jimmy's, and went home.

* * * *

There was no evidence of structure in the text. In English, one can expect to find a ‘U’ after a ‘Q',

or a vowel after a cluster of consonants. The aspirate is seldom doubled, nothing is ever tripled,

and so on. But in the Procyon transmission, everything seemed utterly random.

The computer counted two-hundred fifty-six distinct pulse patterns. Eight bits. Nothing recurred

at sufficient intervals to be a space. And the frequency count of these pulse patterns, or

characters, was flat; there was no quantitative difference in use from one to another. All appeared

approximately the same number of times. If it was a language, it was a language with no

discernible vowels.

I called Wes Phillips, who was then the only linguist I knew. Was it possible for a language to be

structured in such a way?

“Oh, I don't think so. Unless you're talking about some sort of construct. Even then....” He

paused. “Harry, I can give you a whole series of reasons in maybe six different disciplines why

languages need high and low frequency letters. To have a flat ‘curve,’ a language would have to

be deliberately designed that way, and it would have to be non-oral. But what practical value

would it have? Why bother?”

* * * *

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Jack McDevitt - Cryptic

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