The Tomorrow Code (8 page)

“Of course not. It has nothing to do with that.”

“Well, I say we have no other choice. We’ll sign him to a contract if that makes you feel any happier. Give him ten percent of the winnings—”

“Five.”

“Okay, five percent. Now where is the message?”

Tane pulled a grimy, much folded, much looked at piece of paper from a back pocket, and they looked at it together, despite having both committed it to memory many times over.

8,11,22,32,39,40,3.202.27.216.195,GUEST,COMPTON1.SOSSOS.TR

Rebecca said, “I’ll ask Fatboy tonight, and if he agrees, we can write up some sort of a contract tomorrow.”

Tane looked up in surprise. “Are you seeing him tonight?”

“Yeah, he’s picking me up after school. We’re going to the movies.”

“I thought we were walking home together, to do some math study.”

“Oh yeah.” Rebecca was silent for a moment. “I forgot to tell you. Sorry.”

“Final exams are only a few weeks away.”

“I know. But I’m pretty comfortable with my math.”

She was, and Tane knew it. She would probably top the country, even without studying. He said a little mean-spiritedly, “Well, if you’re so clever, how come you haven’t solved the rest of the message yet?”

202.27.216.195,GUEST,COMPTON1.SOSSOS.TR

Rebecca ignored the barb. “How far in the future do you think the message has come from?”

“Who knows. Maybe thousands of years. What I’d like to know is who sent it.”

“Me too.”

The bell sounded distantly, beyond the concrete confines of the Fred Dawson Memorial Garden. The end of lunchtime.

That night, Friday night, while Rebecca was at the movies with Tane’s big brother, Tane figured out the rest of the message.

Fatboy laughed. It was a friendly chuckle, but it sounded like an evil cackle to Tane, like the villain in a pantomime: “Moo-ha-ha-ha.”

Fatboy said, “Five percent? Listen, little bro, I’m happy to go shares in a Lotto ticket with you; just don’t tell Mum. But I’ll chip in a third of the price, and we’ll go thirds on any prize. You won’t win the big one; the odds against that are enormous.”

Rebecca and Tane shared a secret look. Saturday morning had dawned clear and calm in the forests surrounding Tane’s house. It was the day of the big weekly draw, and that meant time was desperately short. Fatboy had picked up Rebecca from her place and brought her around on his Harley, because she’d told him that she and Tane wanted to discuss something important with him.

When he had found out that it concerned a Lotto ticket, he had roared with laughter.
Moo-ha-ha-ha!

Tane said stubbornly, “All right, ten percent.” He crossed out the figure on the contract that he had prepared, using his best legalese, and wrote in “ten percent.”

He handed the paper to Fatboy, who promptly tore it across the middle and laughed again. “Forget it. It’s a silly bit of fun. You don’t need a contract, and if I buy you the ticket, then we go thirds. Take it or leave it.”

Tane growled under his breath, and Fatboy asked cheerily, “What, have you got it rigged or something?” and laughed again.

“Okay,” Rebecca said, a little too loudly. “We go thirds. You buy the ticket, you claim the prize—”

“If we win,” interjected Tane quickly.

“If we win. And you guarantee that you will give two-thirds of the money to me and Tane.”

“Boy Scout’s honor,” said Fatboy, who, unlike Tane, had never been a Boy Scout.

Tane glared at Rebecca for a while before bringing out an envelope. The six Lotto numbers and the Powerball Jackpot number were clearly listed on the side. Inside were some crisp new five-dollar bills.

“Just these?”

“That’s all,” Tane responded. “For tonight’s draw, and each week from now on.”

“That’s just one line. The more lines you buy, the better your chances.”

“We don’t want any other numbers, thanks all the same.”

Fatboy persisted. “Look, you can’t buy less than four lines, but if you’re going to buy a ticket, you might as well give yourself a decent chance. Get a lucky dip with ten lines on it.”

“No.” Rebecca transfixed Fatboy with her gaze and spoke in a quiet, steady voice that eliminated all room for doubt. “No. Get four lines, then; you can choose the other numbers. But whatever you do, make sure you get the numbers on the side of the envelope.”

Fatboy stopped laughing and looked at them both a little strangely for a moment, then shook his head as if dismissing a fanciful idea. “Cool, kids.” He took the envelope with a sweep of his hand and stood up. “See you, Becks. See you, little bro.”

“If we win the six million, you promise you’ll share it?” Tane asked one last time.

“If we win the six million, I’ll eat my motorcycle helmet!” Fatboy was out the door, his final laugh echoing back in through the open window.
Moo-ha-ha-ha.
Then the throaty roar of his bike and he was gone.

“He’ll be honest,” Rebecca said in a conciliatory way to Tane, who felt anything but conciliatory.

He nodded. “He’d better. But you’re right. What else could we do? Imagine if the numbers come up and we haven’t got a ticket!” He looked at her for a moment and she looked at him. Then, at exactly the same time, they both burst out laughing. It had nothing to do with Fatboy, Tane thought. It was just the sheer excitement of it all, and maybe a bit of relief at having finally solved
the problem.

Now the new problem was how to fill in the time until the live televised Lotto draw at eight o’clock that evening. Tane looked at his watch. Only nine hours and forty-seven minutes to go.

He said, “Our share would be four million dollars. What could we buy with that?”

“A new house,” Rebecca murmured, almost to herself. “But don’t forget the SOS. There’s more to this whole thing than getting rich. Whoever sent those numbers did so for a reason.”

Tane stood up with a mischievous glint in his eye. “You’d better come see this.”

Tane’s computer was on in his bedroom. Rebecca sat on the bed while Tane took the chair and opened an Internet browser. She watched with a fascinated frown as he typed some numbers into the address bar.

202.27.216.195.

“Those are the numbers from the message…,” she realized.

Tane nodded. “It’s an IP address. We learned about those last year.”

“An Internet address. Of course!” Rebecca actually smacked herself on the forehead like they do in cartoons. “I should have recognized the pattern. What Web site does it take us to?”

“Have a look.”

She stood behind him as the page slowly loaded onto the screen. The first thing that came up was the bright blue NASA logo. The next was a series of letters that they both recognized: BATSE. Below that were Username and Password boxes. Tane carefully typed “guest” into the Username, and “Compton1” into the Password.

He said, “It took me a couple of goes to get it right, because it was case sensitive.”

“You clever bunny,” Rebecca breathed. “Is this what I think it is?”

Tane nodded. “All the BATSE data.” He pointed at a list. “That’s the one we got from Professor Barnes. And that one arrived yesterday. These are all the ones in between. Want to analyze them?”

“Wanna try and stop me!” She almost kicked him out of the chair.

A moment later, her program was whirring away.

“It’ll be quicker this time,” she said. “I reprogrammed it to look for the Morse code patterns. It’s quite clever but also quite complex. Do you want to know…”

“I—”

She didn’t give him time to answer. “I went back and examined the raw data, and I found out something interesting. You see, the bursts are radiation waves, like an AM radio signal using amplitude modification to convey the ones and zeroes—”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Tane grinned.

“No, it’s simple!” Rebecca said. “Imagine waves on a beach. There are big waves; those are ones. And there are little waves; those are zeroes.”

“Okay.” Tane nodded. “That much I understand.”

“But sometimes there are gaps between the waves. And those are the gaps between the Morse code characters!”

“That is clever! And it’ll make it much easier,” Tane said. They had spent ages trying to work out all the possible combinations of the first message.

“Yeah, and faster…” She paused, noticing Tane’s sly smile. “What are you smiling at?”

“I think I know who sent the message.”

“You do?! Who?”

“Well, my guess is that was the final part of the message. Kind of like a signing off.”

“TR?”

“Who do you know with the initials TR?”

Rebecca looked blank, and Tane’s grin grew bigger.

“Isn’t it obvious? TR. Tane and Rebecca. It’s us. We sent the message to ourselves!”

Rebecca blinked rapidly a few times but said nothing as the enormity of that sank in.

Eventually she said, “Makes you wonder about the SOS, then, doesn’t it.”

Tane looked at his watch again. Nine hours and forty-three minutes to go.

S
ATURDAY
N
IGHT

Tane’s watch said twenty minutes
to go, and he was sure the hands were standing still. But as he watched, the second hand inexorably flicked over. From where he was sitting, on the soft leather sofa in the middle lounge of his parents’ house, the lights of the city blazed up into the clear night sky. The flashing lights of an airplane made a staccato string of pearls through the sky above the city. He barely noticed it. The second hand ticked over again.

Rebecca’s program had already decoded a second message from the future and was busy working on the third. The second message was just as cryptic as the first.

PROFVICGRNCHMRAPRJCTSTOPIT.

BUYSUBEONTLS.DNTGOMST.DNTTLNE1.

Rebecca was clicking her fingers in front of Tane’s face to get his attention.

“Concentrate,” Rebecca said. “This is important.”

Tane didn’t think it was all that important, but it was taking Rebecca’s mind off the last twenty minutes, so he tried to concentrate, for her sake.

It was hard. His hands were shaking and he wanted to vomit. If the numbers were right, then Rebecca would be able to pay all their bills, and they wouldn’t have to move to Masterton. Everything would be all right.

“It’s called the grandfather paradox, and it goes like this. What if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would I go back in time and kill Grandad? He’s nice. I’ve got nothing against Grandad.”

“Tane! Focus! That doesn’t matter. We’re just saying
if.
Okay.
If
you went back in time and killed your grandfather when he was just a boy, then you would have never been born. Therefore, you could not have gone back in time to kill your grandfather. And so you would have been born, and so you could go back and kill him, but then you wouldn’t have been born…and around and around it goes.”

“Grandad takes me fishing,” Tane said, but quickly added, when he saw that he was about to get thumped, “But I get it, I get it!”

“Some people say that time is like a Möbius strip. An endless loop with no start, no end, and a single surface, called the present.”

Tane just shook his head. This science stuff was elementary to Rebecca, but it was way beyond him. His watch said nineteen minutes to go.
What if the numbers were wrong! What if they weren’t Lotto numbers at all?

“What’s a Möbius strip?” he asked.

“Oh, come on! Do you ever stay awake in math?” Rebecca cried, and jumped up. She disappeared into Tane’s room for a second and reemerged with paper, scissors, tape, and a pen. Tane watched intently as she cut a long strip from the paper and held the ends together in a loop.