The Lure (8 page)

For the hell of it, he put
A
= 0,
B
= 1 and so on: CBADDDCCDBDCCBCDBA …

There were no E’s or F’s. It looked utterly random. All he could say was that they were using a four-letter alphabet.

A four-letter alphabet.

They.

Petrie had come across a four-letter alphabet before. His mouth was dry.

He went to the second spiral of particles, the one which had waltzed with the first one. The particles here too were bunched in little groups of up to four. He did the same letter substitution and asked the computer to line up the letters from each spiral, in two long columns.

A pattern.

The two columns were thousands of rows long, each one looked totally random, and yet no two rows had the same letter. In fact,
A
in column one was invariably matched by
B
in two.
B
in one was matched by
A
in two and so on. He wrote:

He glanced at the computer clock for the first time in hours. It was five past four. And now the excitement which had been growing inside him was at the point where he felt himself going faint.

He stacked the movie frames one on top of the other, starting at the beginning of the blizzard. The program took an hour to put together. He kept making elementary blunders and knew he could have done the job in a third of the time had he been fresh. Finally he had something cobbled together. The clock said 5.40 a.m.; it would soon be dawn. He was light-headed with exhaustion.

He stacked the frames into a solid, three-dimensional shape. He made the shape tumble slowly on the screen.

And he felt something like fear.

Now, at last, he took the time to sum up his night’s work.

There were the rotating spirals: the double helix, now slowly tumbling on his screen, joined by rungs.

There was the four-lettered alphabet which ran through the rungs of the spiral ladders.

There was the complementarity, each letter on one half of the rung being matched by a consistent, different letter on the other half.

ABCD,
an arbitrary choice of letters. Replace by
AGCT.

Adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine.

The building blocks of DNA.

9

Genome

Gibson spotted Petrie a couple of hundred metres away. The mathematician was wandering down the long path outside the castle; his head was bowed and he seemed to be muttering. His hands were waving as if he was addressing an imaginary audience. The path went towards the village but Gibson suspected the young man didn’t know where he was going.

A light mist was clearing from the trees and the early morning sky was blue, but there was ice in the wind.

Gibson took a short cut over the snow and caught up with Petrie at the church. The mathematician’s eyes were bloodshot and he had an overnight stubble. His face was drawn, almost as if he was in pain. He looked at Gibson vaguely, as if he didn’t recognise the man.

‘For Christ’s sake, Tom, look at you. Get to bed.’

‘What about the others?’ Petrie asked. The words came out slurred.

‘They flaked out hours ago.’

‘What about Freya?’ Petrie didn’t know why he’d asked that; it just came out.

‘She’s up early, like me. She’s reading a ton of downloads in the computer room.’

‘Has she made progress?’

Gibson made a so-so facial gesture. He was now pacing alongside Petrie; they turned left along a quiet road. A middle-aged man was sitting humped forwards on a hay-cart pulled by a small horse, sacking over his head and shoulders to protect him from the cold. There was an exchange of
‘Dobryden’,
and then the horse had clip-clopped past them. The smell of hay and horse lingered in the cold morning air.

‘What about you?’

Petrie gave Gibson a strange look. He said, ‘I have something to announce.’

Gibson stopped. ‘Well?’

‘Get them out of bed, Charlie. I want everyone to hear this together.’

‘I run this outfit. Tell me what you’ve got.’

‘This is for your team to hear.’

‘Tom!’

Petrie relented; the man was like a starved dog waiting for a biscuit. He said, ‘Okay, I tell the team but you get the preview. The signal is intelligent.’

For some seconds Gibson could have been a statue. He peered into Petrie’s eyes, looking for clues. Then he gave a sort of moan, like a man in a trance. He performed a brief Zorba the Greek dance on the road, clicking his fingers and laughing. Finally his eyes widened, he shouted, ‘God in heaven!’ and sprinted back along the road, passing the hay-cart and swerving right up the hill towards the castle. Petrie carried on walking, humming to himself.

In a minute Petrie heard running footsteps. He turned. Gibson had reappeared at speed, arms waving to keep balance on the slippery road. His mood had swung from beatitude to desperate anxiety. He stopped at Petrie, his chest heaving with the sprint. ‘Pulsars. Fucking pulsars. Bleep bleep bleep in the Cambridge radio telescope. A secretive lot, that group, they sat on it for six months because they thought they were detecting little green men only it turned out they weren’t little green men, they were spinning neutron stars.’ He glared fiercely at Petrie, looking for reassurance.

‘Charlie, pattern recognition is my business. It’s why you asked me here, remember? No natural process could produce what you detected. That signal is the product of a mind.’

Charlie smiled again, an enraptured saint. ‘The discovery of all time. The Nobel for sure.’

‘A Nobel Prize, Charlie, but that’s the least of it. Think about it. We’re not alone. There are thinking beings out there. What effect is this going to have on society?’

‘Who cares? The effect on me is a Nobel Prize.’ Then: ‘The pattern really is intelligent? You’re absolutely sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You said a mind? A signal?’ Gibson’s face was distorted by a ferocious intensity. ‘Are you saying it’s a message?’

‘I don’t know what it is.’

Gibson took Petrie by the arm and they reversed direction, back towards the castle and the receding hay-cart. His eyes were lit with an evangelical gleam and his words came out rapidly, almost staccato. ‘I’m very concerned about you, Tom, you need sleep, then you can waken up nice and fresh and crack the code, you’ll do that, won’t you, Tom? You’ll wake up nice and fresh and crack the code? Then we’ll all get big juicy Nobel Prizes, you for cracking the code and me for being the big cheese and we’ll all be famous just so long as you get some sleep and then wake up and crack the fucking code for Christ’s sake, please, just as quick as you can.’

10

Poet’s Dream

After the penetrating cold, the warmth of the castle hit Petrie like a sleeping pill. Gibson, however, was in a high state of excitement. He now decided that the young mathematician could endure a little more sleep deprivation in the name of science. He took Petrie by the elbow, guided him upstairs to the common room, propped him in a chair and bustled through to the kitchen. Presently he came back with a mug of strong, sweet, black coffee. ‘The cleaners turn up about eight,’ he said for no obvious reason. Then he vanished, singing loudly and tunelessly.

Freya and Svetlana were first to appear, Svetlana in black jeans and sweater, Freya in the same long skirt and red blouse she had worn in the BMW. ‘Good morning, Tom,’ Freya said. ‘You look terrible.’

‘Like death warmed up,’ Svetlana added, flopping into a couch. ‘My great-aunt was a better cook than Vashislav’s and she taught me how to make
pyzy
which have been known to revive frozen corpses.’

‘Later,’ Gibson said curtly. He popped out of the door impatiently, popped in again, and repeated the cycle twice before Shtyrkov arrived. The Russian sat down heavily on the couch next to Svetlana; the armchairs looked as if they would be too tight a fit. He grinned expectantly at Petrie.

‘Tom has something to announce,’ Gibson said triumphantly.

Petrie sipped at the over-sweet coffee. Exhaustion was blurring his words. ‘Vashislav’s suspicions were right. The signal can’t be caused by any natural phenomenon. It’s coming from an intelligent source.’

Freya gasped briefly, and then there was a long, stunned silence.

Shtyrkov muttered something in Russian, under his breath. Then Svetlana began to laugh and cry and Shtyrkov patted her shoulder. ‘Stay calm, child.’

Svetlana produced a paper handkerchief, blew her nose and smiled sheepishly. ‘I suppose the first thing is to be sure that Tom is right.’

‘I can prove it. But the proof involves a bigger shock. I warn you, it’ll blow your mind.’

‘A bigger shock? Bigger than ET?’ Alarm and greed mingled in Gibson’s pale face.

Petrie put the mug on a table. ‘Come through to the office.’

The office smelled slightly of stale sweat. Petrie threw up the cartoon picture of the lake and rotated it to orient his little audience in three dimensions. Then he fired particles through the lake, tapping at the keyboard to progressively slow down the flow. As the movie slowed, the stream appeared at first like a blizzard sweeping through the lake at a shallow angle. And then, with further slowing, individual trajectories became distinguishable, patterns began to appear, complicated and swirling, with blank periods in between.

And then Petrie explained about turning the lake so that it was face-on to the flow, and replacing each particle track by a point so that at any instant the lake was covered by a pattern of dots. And then he zoomed in on some of the fine structure and explained about the four-base arithmetic. And then he told them how he had stacked the microseconds of time on top of each other so that each slice of time became a thin slice in a jelly, so that the stacked slices defined a solid, three-dimensional structure. And then a century passed while Petrie tapped in a final set of instructions until, on the screen, slowly rotating and beyond any possibility of mistake or misinterpretation, was the double helix of DNA.

Shtyrkov sang, quietly. Gibson said, ‘Oh man.’

Petrie left it on the screen, tumbling slowly, hypnotising them; even menacing them. He felt his limbs covered with goosepimples. ‘I don’t know whether it’s even remotely human, but it’s surely biological.’

There was a long silence, eventually broken by Shtyrkov. ‘How much time does this represent?’

‘The first minute of the transmission.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s only three per cent of the message. We have another thirty-six minutes to analyse.’

Gibson said again, ‘Oh, man.’

Freya said, ‘They gave us this up-front for a reason.’

‘Yes,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘They didn’t want us to miss it. That’s their starting point. They’re saying, “Hey, we’re life forms just like you.”’

‘Is this a hoax?’ Gibson asked hoarsely.

Petrie looked up. ‘If it is, you’re not in on it, Charlie. You’re as white as a sheet.’

‘Look at us all,’ Freya said.

‘No, I mean someone monkeying with the equipment. Or something.’ But Gibson’s voice trailed off as the absurdity of his own suggestion got through to him.

‘Hey, Charlie, the lake glowed.’ Svetlana was speaking quietly, as if all emotion had now been drained out of her.

‘An external input of some sort? From a satellite? Look – I know it’s stupid.’

‘No, no, you’re right, Charlee. We have to think it through,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘We must eliminate everything, even stupid ideas. Keep them coming.’

‘What sort of particles were these?’ Petrie asked. ‘Can you tell?’

Svetlana pointed to a far corner of the lake. ‘Can you zoom into that?’

Petrie obliged.

‘Now go back to the original trajectories, not the points.’

A cluster of parallel lines appeared.

‘Now turn them. Look at the lines face-on.’

The lines shrank, turned back into points.

‘Right. Absolutely straight, no curvature. In that corner, Tom, about twenty metres under the water, we have a dipole magnet that weighs half a ton and gives us forty thousand gauss. If we swam anywhere near it with anything metal we’d be pulled under. If the particles were charged their tracks would bend near the magnet.’

‘And they don’t.’

‘Exactly, so they’re not cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are charged, they’d be deflected. We have half a dozen magnets like that under the water and we can do more checks if you like.’

‘Okay, Svetlana, if they’re not cosmic rays, what then?’

‘This time yesterday I’d have called them dark matter.’

‘And today?’

‘A neutral particle penetrating half a mile of rock? Unknown.’

‘A vast surge of them,’ Gibson reminded her. ‘Double unknown.’

‘Unknown to us,’ Svetlana said.

‘Which safely rules out some clown playing games with satellites.’ Petrie was having trouble holding his head upright.

Freya said, ‘The particles could have penetrated the lake from below.’

‘You mean they came clean through the Earth?’ Gibson asked.

‘Or from some accelerator on the surface of the Earth. Therefore it still might be a trick.’ Svetlana was saying the words with every sign of disbelieving them.

‘Total fantasy,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘A flux of this magnitude is thousands of years in the future even if we were dealing with a known particle type, which we’re not.’ He struggled out of his chair. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we can securely eliminate both a natural source and a human one. Tom is right.’

‘You were right, Vash,’ said Petrie loyally. ‘Your intuition saw this.’

Shtyrkov brushed the compliment aside. ‘Lunacy has its compensations.’

‘If that was just their opener, what about the rest of the message?’ Charlie asked, his voice greedy. ‘What’s in it?’

Petrie said, ‘If I don’t get some sleep I’ll crack up.’

‘I don’t care.’ Gibson didn’t seem to be joking. He was jiggling around excitedly.