Rollback

by Robert J. Sawyer

  And a few TV shows and webcasts had dutifully done little pieces last fall noting that a response could be received “any day now.” But none was. Not in October, not in November, not in December, not in January, not…

  Not until right now.

  No sooner had Sarah gotten off the phone with Lenore than it rang again. The call, as she revealed in a stage whisper while holding her hand over the mouthpiece, was from CNN. Don remembered the pandemonium the last time, when she had figured out the purpose of the first message—God, where had the decades gone?

  Everyone was now standing or sitting in a semicircle, looking at Sarah. Even the children had recognized that something major was going on, although they had no idea what.

  “No,” Sarah was saying. “No, I have no comment. No, you can’t. It’s my anniversary today. I’m not going to let it be ruined by strangers in the house. What? No, no. Look, I really have to go. All right, then. All right, then. Yes, yes. Good-bye.” She pushed the button that terminated the call, then looked up at Don, and lifted her frail shoulders a bit. “Sorry for all the bother,” she said. “It’s—”

  The phone rang again, an electronic bleeping that Don disliked at the best of times. Carl, taking command, took the handset from his mother and flicked off the ringer. “They can leave a message if they like.”

  Sarah frowned. “But what if somebody needs help?”

  Carl spread his arms. “Your whole family is here. Who else would call for help? Relax, Mom. Let’s enjoy the rest of the party.”

  Don looked around the room. Carl had been sixteen when his mother had been briefly famous, but Emily had been just ten, and hadn’t really understood what had been going on. She was staring at Sarah with astonishment on her narrow face.

  Phones in the other rooms were ringing, but they were easy enough to ignore. “So,” he said, “did—what was her name? Lenore? Did she say anything about the message’s content?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No. Just that it was definitely from Sigma Draconis, and seems to begin, at least, with the same symbol set used last time.”

  Angela said, “Aren’t you dying to know what the reply says?”

  Sarah reached out her arms in a way that said “help me up.” Carl stepped forward and did just that, gently bringing his mother to her feet. “Sure, I’d like to know,” she said. “But it’s still coming in.” She looked at her daughter-in-law. “So let’s get started making dinner.”

  THE KIDS AND grandkids left around 9:00 p.m. Carl, Angela, and Emily had done all the work cleaning up after dinner, and so Don and Sarah simply sat on the living-room couch, enjoying the restored calm. Emily had gone around at one point, shutting off all the other ringers on the phones, and they were still off. But the answering machine’s digital display kept changing every few minutes. Don was reminded of another old joke, this one from his teenage years, about the guy who liked to follow Elizabeth Taylor to McDonald’s so he could watch the numbers change. Those signs had been stuck at “Over 99 Billion Served” for decades, but he remembered the hoopla when they’d all finally been replaced with new ones that read, “Over 1 Trillion Served.”

  Sometimes it was better to just stop counting, he thought—especially when it’s a counting down instead of a counting up. They’d both made it to eighty-seven, and to sixty years together. But they surely wouldn’t be around for a seventieth anniversary; that just wasn’t in the cards. In fact…

  In fact, he was surprised they’d lived this long, but maybe they’d been holding on, striving to reach the diamond milestone. All his life, he’d read about people who died just days after their eightieth, ninetieth, or hundredth birthdays. They’d clung to life, literally by the force of their wills, until the big day had been reached, and then they’d just let go.

  Don had turned eighty-seven three months ago, and Sarah had done so five months before that. That hadn’t been what they’d been holding on for. But a sixtieth wedding anniversary! How rare that was!

  He would have liked to put his arm around Sarah’s shoulders as they sat side by side on the couch, but it pained him to rotate his own shoulder that much, and—

  And then it hit him. Maybe she hadn’t been hanging on for their anniversary. Maybe what had really kept her going all this time was waiting to see what reply the Dracons would send. He wished contact had been made with a star thirty or forty light-years away, instead of just nineteen. He wanted her to keep holding on. He didn’t know what he’d do if she let go, and—

  And he’d read that news story, too, dozens of times over the years: the husband who dies only days after his wife; the wife who finally seems to give up and let go shortly after hubby passes away.

  Don knew a day like today called for some comment, but when he opened his mouth, what came out were just two words, that, he guessed, summarized it all: “Sixty years.”

  She nodded. “A long time.”

  He was quiet for a while, then: “Thank you.”

  She turned her head to look at him. “For what?”

  “For—” He lifted his eyebrows and raised his shoulders a bit as he sought an answer. And then, finally, he said, very softly, “Everything.”

  Next to them, on the little table beside the couch, the counter on the answering machine tallied up another call. “I wonder what the aliens’ reply says,” Don said. “I hope it’s not just one of those damn autoresponders. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ll be away from the planet for the next million years.’” Sarah laughed, and Don went on. “‘If you need immediate assistance, please contact my assistant Zagdorf at…’”

  “You are a supremely silly man,” she said, patting the back of his hand.

  EVEN THOUGH THEY only had voice phones, Sarah and Don did have a modern answering machine. “Forty-eight calls were received since you last reviewed your messages,” the device’s smooth male voice said the next morning as they sat at the dining-room table. “Of those, thirty-nine left messages. All thirty-nine were for Sarah. Thirty-one were from the media. Rather than presenting them in order of receipt, I suggest you let me prioritize them for you, sorting by audience size. Starting with the TV networks, CNN—”

  “What about the calls that weren’t from the media?” Sarah asked.

  “The first was from your hairdresser. The second is from the SETI Institute. The third is from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. The fourth—”

  “Play the one from U of T.”

  A squeaky female voice came on. “Good morning, Professor Halifax. This is Lenore again—you know, Lenore Darby. Sorry to be phoning so early, but I thought someone should give you a call. Everyone’s been working on interpreting the message as it comes in—here, over in Mountain View, at the Allen, everywhere—and, well, you’re not going to believe this, Professor Halifax, but we think the message is”—the voice lowered a bit, as if its owner was embarrassed to go on—“encrypted. Not just encoded for transmission, but actually encrypted—you know, scrambled so that it can’t be read without a decryption key.”

  Sarah looked at Don, her face astonished. Lenore went on. “I know sending us an encrypted message doesn’t make any sense, but that seems to be what the Dracons have done. The beginning of the message is all math stuff, laid out in that symbol set they used before, and the computer gunks say the math describes a decryption algorithm. And then the rest of the message is total gibberish, presumably because it has indeed been encrypted. Get it? They’ve told us how the message is encrypted, and given us the algorithm to unlock it, but they haven’t given us the decryption key to feed into that algorithm to do the actual unlocking. It’s the craziest thing, and—”

  “Pause,” said Sarah. “How long does she go on?”

  “Another two minutes, sixteen seconds,” said the machine, and then it added, “She’s quite chatty.”

  Sarah shook her head and looked at Don. “Encrypted!” she declared. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why in God’s name would aliens send us a message we can’
t read?”

  –-- Chapter 3 --–

  SARAH FONDLY REMEMBERED Seinfeld, although, sadly, it hadn’t aged well. Still, one of Jerry’s bits of stand-up seemed as true today as it had been half a century ago. When it came to TV, most men were hunters, switching from channel to channel, always on the prowl for something better, while women were nesters, content to settle in with a single program. But today, Sarah found herself scanning constantly; the puzzle of the encrypted message from Sigma Draconis was all over the TV and the web. She caught coverage of oddsmakers paying off winners who’d correctly guessed the day on which a reply would be received, fundamentalists decrying the new signal as a temptation from Satan, and crackpots claiming to have already decrypted the secret transmission.

  Of course, she was delighted that there had been a reply, but as she continued to flip channels on the giant monitor above the mantel, she reflected that she was also disappointed that in all the years since they’d detected the first message, no other alien radio source had been found. As Sarah had once said in an interview very much like the ones she was looking at today, it was certainly true that we weren’t alone—but we were still pretty lonely.

  Her surfing was interrupted each time someone came up to the front door and rang the bell; an image of whoever it was automatically appeared on the monitor. Mostly it seemed to be reporters; there were still a few journalists who did more than send email, make phone calls, and surf the web.

  Those neighbors who had lived here on Betty Ann Drive four decades ago knew Sarah’s claim to fame, but most of the houses had changed hands several times since then. She wondered what her newer neighbors made of the succession of news vans that had pulled into her driveway. Ah, well; at least it wasn’t something to be embarrassed about, like the cop cars that kept showing up at the Kuchma place across the road, and, so far, Sarah had simply ignored all the people who had rung her doorbell, but—

  My God.

  But she couldn’t ignore this.

  The face that had suddenly appeared on the monitor was not human.

  “Don!” she called, her voice dry. “Don, come here!”

  He had gone into the kitchen to make coffee—decaf, of course; it was all Dr. Bonhoff would let either of them have these days. He shuffled into the living room, wearing a teal cardigan over an untucked red shirt. “What?”

  She gestured at the monitor. “My…goodness,” he said softly. “How’d it get here?”

  She pointed at the screen. Partially visible behind the strange head was their driveway, which Carl had shoveled before leaving yesterday. An expensive-looking green car was sitting on it. “In that, I guess.”

  The doorbell rang once more. She doubted the being pushing the button was actually getting impatient. Rather, she suspected, some dispassionate timer told it to try again.

  “Do you want me to let it in?” asked Don, still looking at the picture of the round, blue face, with its unblinking eyes.

  “Um, sure,” Sarah said. “I guess.”

  She watched as he made his way to the little staircase leading to the entryway, and began the slow pilgrimage down, one painful step at a time. She followed him and stood at the top of the stairs—and noted that one of her grandkids had forgotten a colorful scarf here. By the time Don reached the door, the bell had sounded a third time, which was the maximum number it was programmed to allow. He undid the deadbolt and the chain, and swung the heavy oak door inward, revealing—

  It had been weeks since Sarah had seen one in the flesh—not that “in the flesh” was the right phrase.

  Standing before them, gleaming in the sunlight, was a robot, one of the very latest models, she guessed; it looked more sophisticated and sleeker than any she’d seen before.

  “Hello,” the robot said to Don, in a perfectly normal male voice. It was about five-foot-six: tall enough to function well in the world, but not so tall as to be intimidating. “Is Dr. Sarah Halifax in?”

  “I’m Sarah Halifax,” she said. The robot’s head swiveled to look up at her. Sarah suspected it was analyzing both her face and her voice to make sure it was really her.

  “Hello, Dr. Halifax,” the robot said. “You haven’t been answering your household phone, so I’ve brought you a replacement. Someone would like to talk to you.” The robot raised its right hand, and in it Sarah could just make out a clamshell datacom.

  “And who might that be?” she asked.

  The robot tilted its head slightly, giving the impression that it was listening to someone somewhere else. “Cody McGavin,” it said. Sarah felt her heart skip a beat; she wished she’d actually been on the staircase, instead of just above it, so she could have grabbed the banister for support. “Will you take his call?”

  Don turned to look at Sarah, his eyes wide, jaw hanging slack.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The word had come out very softly, but the robot apparently had no trouble hearing her. “May I?” it asked.

  Don nodded and stepped aside. The robot came into the entryway, and, to Sarah’s astonishment, she saw it was wearing simple galoshes, which, in a fluid motion, it bent over and removed, exposing blue metal feet. The machine walked across the vestibule, its heels clicking against the old, much-scuffed hardwood there, and it easily went up the first two steps, which was as far as it had to go to be able to proffer the datacom to Sarah. She took it.

  “Flip it open,” the robot said helpfully.

  She did so, then heard a ringing through the small speaker. She quickly brought the device to her ear.

  “Hello, Dr. Halifax,” said a crisp female voice. It was a little hard for Sarah to make out; she wished she knew how to adjust the volume. “Please hold for Mr. McGavin.”

  Sarah looked at her husband. She’d repeatedly told him how much she hated people who made her wait like this. It was almost always some self-important jackass who felt his time was more valuable than anyone else’s. But in this case, Sarah supposed, that was actually true. Oh, there might be a few people on Earth who made more per hour than Cody McGavin, but, offhand, she couldn’t name any of them.

  As Sarah often said, SETI is the Blanche Dubois of scientific undertakings: it has always depended on the kindness of strangers. Whether it was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen donating 13.5 million dollars in 2004 to fund an array of radio telescopes, or the hundreds of thousands of private computer users who gave up their spare processing cycles to the SETI@home project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence had managed to struggle on decade after decade through the largesse of those who believed, first, that we might not be alone, and, later, that it actually mattered that we were not alone.

  Cody McGavin had made billions by the time he was forty, developing robotic technology. His proprioceptive sensor webs were behind every sophisticated robot on the planet. Born in 1985, he’d been fascinated by astronomy, science fiction, and space travel all his life. His collection of artifacts from the Apollo program, an endeavor that had come and gone long before he was born, was the largest in the world. And, after the passing of Paul Allen, he’d become by far SETI’s biggest single benefactor.

  As soon as Sarah had been put on hold, music started playing. She recognized it as Bach—and got the joke; she was probably one of the few people left alive who would. Years ago, long before the first Draconis signal had been received, during a discussion of what message should be beamed to the stars, Carl Sagan had vetoed the suggestion of Bach, because, he’d said, “That would be bragging.”

  In the middle of the concerto, the famous voice came on; McGavin spoke with one of those Boston accents that managed to say “Harvard” with no discernible R sound. “Hello, Dr. Halifax. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  She found her voice cracking in a way that had nothing to do with age. “That’s all right.”

  “Well, they did it, didn’t they?” he said, with relish. “They replied.”

  “It seems so, sir.” There weren’t many people an eighty-seven-year-old felt inclined to c
all “sir,” but it had come spontaneously to her lips.

  “I knew they would,” said McGavin. “I just knew it. We’ve got us a dialogue going here.”

  She smiled. “And now it’s our turn to reply again—once we figure out how to decrypt the message.” Don had been moving across the little entryway, and now was climbing the six stairs. When he was all the way up, she held the datacom at an angle to her face so he could hear McGavin, too. The robot, meanwhile, had taken up a position just inside the front door.

  “Exactly, exactly,” said McGavin. “We’ve got to keep the conversation going. And that’s what I’m calling about, Sarah—you don’t mind if I call you Sarah, do you?”

  She actually quite liked it when younger people called her by her first name; it made her feel more alive. “Not at all.”

  “Sarah, I’ve got a—call it a proposition for you.”

  Sarah couldn’t help herself. “My husband is standing right here.”

  McGavin chuckled. “A proposal, then.”

  “Still here,” said Don.

  “Hee hee,” said McGavin. “Let’s call it an offer, then. An offer I don’t think you’ll want to refuse.”

  Don used to do a good Brando in his youth. He puffed out his cheeks, frowned, and moved his head as if shaking jowls, but said nothing. Sarah laughed silently and swatted his arm affectionately. “Yes?” she said, into the datacom.

  “I’d like to discuss it with you face-to-face. You’re in Toronto, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind coming down here, to Cambridge? I’d have one of my planes bring you down.”

  “I…I wouldn’t want to travel without my husband.”

  “Of course not; of course not. This affects him, too, in a way. Won’t you both come down?”

  “Um, ah, give us a moment to discuss it.”