The Lure (15 page)

Freya frowned. ‘Tom, if that’s right, it needn’t be thirty million light years away or even three light years away. Its distance could be anything.’ She stood up, and paced up and down in thought. Then: ‘There’s another clue. Whichever of the two directions it came from, it’s well away from the ecliptic.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s not orbiting in the plane of the planets, or the asteroids, or the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt. It could be out in the Oort cloud.’

‘The what?’

‘A cloud of comets orbiting the Sun far beyond the planets, where the Sun’s gravity is very weak. The comets just barely hang on to the solar system. You could have something the size of the Moon out there and you’d never detect it.’

‘What’s the travel time of a signal from the Oort cloud?’

‘A few months. A few weeks from the inner cloud.’

‘Do you see what that means, Freya?’

Freya was tight-lipped. ‘Of course. The galactic club isn’t something for our distant descendants. We could be members by this summer.’

‘An automated probe. An automated probe.’ Petrie began to pace up and down, his head bowed.

Freya, struck by a sudden thought, cupped her hands over her mouth. ‘There’s more.’

Petrie stopped.

She paused to gather her thoughts. Then, ‘Okay. If there’s a probe targeting us then it’s somewhere in the solar system otherwise it would just zip by. But if it’s too close it wouldn’t last. If you injected something into an orbit between the planets, the chances are it would be thrown around chaotically by the gravitational fields of Jupiter and Saturn and end up falling into the Sun or being thrown out of the solar system altogether.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘It depends on the orbit, but you’d be okay for typically a few millennia to a few hundred millennia. There are stable zones inside the asteroid belt but they’re crowded and anything in them eventually gets hit by something moving at kilometres per second. If the signallers have put a robot probe well clear of the ecliptic plane – well away from the planets – they’ve been planning for longevity.’

Petrie’s mouth opened and shut with astonishment. ‘But you’re talking millions of years.’

‘It looks like it. We’re so used to thinking in short time spans, I suppose because our civilisation is only a few thousand years old.’

To Freya, Petrie’s round spectacles were making him look like a surprised owl. ‘I’m beginning to understand this. In fact…’ his voice trailed off.

‘Well?’

‘No, it can’t be.’

‘Do you want another nip?’

Petrie shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Freya, you just wouldn’t grasp it.’

Freya gaped. ‘You conceited…’

‘No, no. It just needs a lot more thought. I can hardly take it in myself.’

‘Tom, come down to earth. Ancient texts can be interpreted in a hundred ways. We need something more concrete.’

*   *   *

An hour later, Freya looked up from the terminal screen. Petrie was still at the table, reading the Bible and scribbling rapidly. There was an excited sparkle in her eyes. ‘I think I’ve struck gold.’

19

The Wheels of Poseidon

Around 6 p.m., Svetlana walked into the library. She could hardly control the excitement in her voice. ‘We think it may be human.’

Freya looked up in surprise. ‘Are you sure?’

‘It’s not flatworm or fruit-fly, and it’s not ape. So far we can’t tell any difference from human DNA. But there’s something odd. I don’t know if there’s an error in Tom’s computer code – where is he?’

Petrie hailed her from the gallery.

‘Tom,’ Svetlana called up, ‘if your code is okay, there’s something extra. Vash is finding dot patterns that stand outside the mainstream. Some bits of the helix may be labelled.’

‘Surely they’re just stray particles?’

‘Vash thinks not. Sometimes the patterns stand near particular genes and the same patterns are found next to other pictures, like maybe molecules. He thinks they’re markers – he calls them flags. He reckons there’s a breakthrough waiting to happen, and he says you need to get back to it right away.’

‘Tell him I’m studying for the priesthood. He’ll have to do his own decoding.’

‘And I’m busy in the kitchen,’ Svetlana told him.

‘Making more
pyzy?
’

‘Doing overtime as a femme fatale. Hanning and I are cooking. And Charlie has a plan. He wants to talk to you all in the bar, now.’

*   *   *

Shtyrkov was standing with his nose pressed up against the steel mesh grill which protected the bar. At first Petrie thought the Russian was wondering how to get at the dazzling array of bottles; but then he saw the little reflections of chandelier in the polished glasses.

‘Vodka withdrawal symptoms?’ Gibson asked the Russian. Gibson himself, Petrie noted, was showing no sign of mental abnormality outside the envelope of a stressed-out scientist.

Shtyrkov turned and sat heavily in a chair, and Petrie and Freya sat on either side of him.

Gibson remained standing, a general briefing his troops. He looked at his watch pretentiously. ‘For those of you who’ve lost track it’s now six o’clock, Friday evening. Here’s the schedule. Tomorrow, Saturday, is our last full day on site. We’re out of here at noon on Sunday. We drive straight to Bratislava: I’ve booked us all on a six o’clock flight to London. At nine a.m. Monday we hold a press conference in Burlington House. Vashislav and Svetlana then fly to Moscow. After that, events will sweep us along.’

‘What about Hanning?’ Petrie asked.

‘I was coming to that. I don’t trust him. He knows we’ll be going for a public announcement but I want him told it will now take place next Wednesday. We just vanish on Sunday at noon.’

They had automatically adopted a conspiratorial tone, as if Hanning could hear through castle walls from the floor below. ‘Wisdom comes with age, Charlee. Not always, and in your case probably not at all, but meantime you would be wise to listen to Papa. And what I say is this.
Don’t wait.
Put the news out on the internet tonight – all the bulletin boards we can think of. And send a message signed by us all to the UN Secretary General. It will be midday in New York.’

‘No, Vash, we need the press conference first. There’ll be questions and we must be on the spot to answer them.’

‘You’re taking a grave risk, Charlee.’ Petrie had never seen Shtyrkov more serious; he wondered what was lying at the back of the Russian’s mind.

Gibson said, ‘Come on, Vash, this thing’s unstoppable.’

*   *   *

‘Come through, children. Let us hear what Tom and Freya have found. Bring your coffees if you wish.’ Shtyrkov was standing at the refectory door like a teacher summoning his pupils. There was a rattle of chairs.

Petrie had found a screen, an overhead projector and a heap of transparencies in a cupboard in the administrator’s office, and had heaved them up to the common room. There was a large Bible next to the projector. The scientists spread themselves around armchairs, and Svetlana killed the lights.

Freya sat on the edge of a desk, holding a scribbled transparency. The projector threw her face into harsh contrast. ‘They’ve been signalling us for centuries.’

Gibson gave a loud, sceptical snort.

‘Most of this has come from a journal called the
Marine Observer.
Look at this.’ She threw up the first transparency:

September 6th, 1977. The merchant vessel
Wild Curlew,
in the north-west Indian Ocean, approached what seemed at first to be a white sea fog. On entering the region it was found that the sea itself was glowing with a milky light. This light seemed also to hover above the surface of the water. It was so strong that it illuminated the clouds overhead.

Marine Observer,
vol. 48, p.118, 1977

‘It’s what you saw in your lake. There are lots of reports like that.’ She thumbed through some papers: ‘… like sailing over a field of snow … gliding over the clouds … an intense white glow not unlike viewing the negative of a photograph…’

Gibson was shaking his head. ‘Come off it, Freya!’

‘I was in Micronesia once,’ Hanning said. ‘We went swimming in the dark, which maybe wasn’t a good idea in those waters. But I remember it well. The water lit up as we swam. We left a luminous trail. It was a wonderful experience.’

‘Exactly,’ Gibson said. ‘Simple bioluminescence. Plankton firing up.’

‘It’s not plankton.’ A stubborn tone was creeping into Freya’s voice. ‘This is from the Captain’s log, on board the merchantman
Ebani.
He’s in the North Atlantic at the time.’ She threw up the transparency:

March 18th, 1977. Spurious echoes have been appearing on the screen all day, like the echoes from small groups of fishing boats. Their behaviour is very strange. The echoes would close to within five nautical miles of us and then disappear. None of us has ever come across this before. Disappeared late afternoon.

2200. The echoes have returned. They came back, closed to within 5.5 n.m., and then spread out around the ship in a circle. The entire sea has taken on a milky appearance and there is a fishy smell. We are all quite unnerved by this.

2400. After 45 minutes, the milky sea disappeared, and the radar returned to normal.

Petrie said, ‘Plankton can’t generate spurious echoes in a ship’s radar.’

Gibson responded irritably. ‘I’m not persuaded, Tom. The dodgy radar could have been a coincidence.’

Shtyrkov snorted from a dark corner of the room. ‘Coincidence, the last refuge of the disappointed scientist.’

Freya said, ‘There’s more. Are you ready for this? August the fourth, 1977. In the Indian Ocean—’

Svetlana interrupted: ‘Five months after the
Ebani
report.’

Freya read aloud from the big screen:

The SS
British Renown
sailed into a large area of milky sea, which was glowing from within. So great was the intensity of this light that the deck appeared to be just a dark shadow. During the display, the humidity seemed to increase and’ –
Freya ran her hand along the text
– ‘the radio operator reported a decreased signal strength at medium and high frequencies.

‘Something is traversing the atmosphere, disturbing it electrically as it passes, and lighting up the ocean.’

‘Charlee probably thinks it’s another coincidence,’ Shtyrkov called over from his corner. ‘Right, Charlee?’

‘The hell with you, Vash.’

‘Throw up the
Wild Curlew
again,’ Svetlana asked. Freya did so. Svetlana said, ‘They’re saying the phosphorescence was
above
the surface of the water.’

Freya nodded. ‘That’s a common feature in these reports.’

‘Maybe Charlie’s plankton have wings.’

Freya said, ‘More likely there are enough water molecules just above the waves to glow when the particles pass through.’

Gibson said, ‘Rubbish.’

Freya said, ‘Explain this one, Charlie. This is from someone on board a ship in the Java Sea on May the twenty-ninth 1955. Ten past two in the morning.’

My first impression was that the ship was being attacked on all sides from different directions by pulsing light-bands, about 2 metres wide and 2 apart and moving at speed. The most intense activity was observed on the starboard side of the ship where the phenomenon stretched as far as the horizon. It was just a mass of high-speed interacting bands of light.

About this time, the ship passed a localised revolving system, distance off about 150 metres. My impression was that of a catherine wheel revolving and casting out waves in an angular motion. How many spokes it had I’m not sure owing to the speed of the pulsations. The system rotated in a clockwise direction wheeling itself along the ship’s track.

‘Maybe the plankton were disturbed by fish moving in tight circles,’ Gibson suggested. There was a shriek of laughter from Shtyrkov’s dark corner.

Freya picked up another transparency. ‘What were the fish doing here, Charlie?’

October 13, 1996, Arabian Gulf. The tanker
Arabiyah.
Expanding phosphorescent rings were observed emanating from a single point. The rings were equally spaced and expanded outwards for about 500 metres before disappearing. Rings with spoke systems also formed, rotating clockwise. The observers had the distinct impression that the rings were above the sea surface.

‘You’ll find this report in the
Marine Observer
volume 67, page 192, 1997.’

‘Freya, are you serious?’ Gibson asked. ‘Do you really expect me to believe these are ET signals?’

Freya gave Gibson the sweet smile which, Petrie was beginning to learn, preceded the verbal equivalent of a right hook.

‘Okay, Charlie, I’d like to hear your explanation of this report. It happened on April the twenty-ninth, 1982, in the China Sea.’ She threw up the transparency and read the words aloud.

The merchant vessel
Siam
encountered parallel phosphorescent bands rushing towards it at about 40 miles an hour. The bands were 50–100 cm above the surface of the sea. The bands then changed into two rotating wheels. The spokes stretched to the horizon. Then a third wheel formed. Then there was nothing for about 20 minutes and then the whole thing restarted with four systems of parallel bands which soon metamorphosed into four rotating wheels. Next, circular, flashing brilliant blue-white light appeared all around the ship out to about 150 metres. This system of patches flashed at 114 times per minute. Water samples revealed no luminous organisms.

The sea was calm, visibility excellent, but atmospheric electrical activity could be seen all around.

‘You’ll find that in the
Marine Observer
again. Volume 53, page 85, 1983,’ she said. ‘Now look at this. This is from a review paper by a couple of marine biologists. The reference is Herring and Watson,
Marine Observer,
volume 63, page 22, 1993.’ There was a slightly triumphant tone as she read the text on the screen.

Most bioluminescent organisms flash briefly and cannot generate the strong steady glow of the milky sea. Marine bacteria glow steadily but unrealistic concentrations of bacteria would be needed to generate the observed light, and in any case samples retrieved from the affected waters show no such bacteria.