by Cramer, John
Not bad, thought Alice, taking notes. Now George is an expert on cosmology too.
“The inflationary scenario,” George continued, “allows for the possibility of many such bubble-universes, each isolated from the rest, each walled off in its own pinched-off isolation from the others and from the greater mega-universe in which they all exist. It now appears that through the Snark, we are receiving a message from intelligent life that inhabits another bubble universe. Apparently it’s easier to contact intelligent life in other universes than it is in your own. That’s the conclusion we’ve reached from studying the Snark diagrams. Inflationary cosmology seems to have been experimentally confirmed.” The questioner nodded and sat down.
Alice observed that there were fewer hands raised now, the audience must be running out of questions. The director called on Jake. He stood and slowly turned to face the audience. “There is a time to push your own work, to toot your own horn,” Jake began. “This, however, is not such a time. A leading member of my LEM team, my friend and colleague Professor George Griffin has made a momentous, unprecedented, and completely unexpected discovery. A discovery which, as he has graciously pointed out, was made possible because of this great accelerator and because of the remarkable sensitivity and measurement capabilities of our LEM detector. I would like to congratulate Professor Griffin on his work. Two weeks ago he tried to interest me in this Snark event, and I blush to admit that I dismissed it as uninteresting background.” He turned to the stage and smiled at George.
“And background it is, in a certain sense,” he continued. “The Snark is not a fundamental particle, not an object of the kind this great facility was built to study. It is something unique, something far stranger. It is an alien artifact, an object whose very nature we can only guess at from the meager clues that their messages have so far provided.”
I can’t believe it, Alice thought. Jake is actually being magnanimous. Could he have had a personality transplant over the weekend? But what did he mean about the Snark not being the kind of object the SSC was built to study?
“Some might argue that Professor Griffin’s discovery lies outside the realm of particle physics. That it more properly belongs in the domain of astrophysics, SETI studies, or even extraterrestrial biology.” Jake paused and looked at the audience.
OK, here it comes, Alice thought.
“But I feel that this great discovery was made in this laboratory, and it should remain in this laboratory. I would like to suggest to the SSC Director and the SSC Executive Committee, with all due respect for their prerogatives, that they should create a Snark Task Force to investigate this new phenomenon as fully and rapidly as possible, that significant laboratory resources be committed to this project, that additional external support be immediately sought from the funding agencies and foundations, and that Professor Griffin be asked to take a leave of absence from his university so that he can head this task force and devote his full effort to this project.” Again he turned to George. “And I want to congratulate Professor Griffin again for his remarkable achievement.”
Facing George, Jake began to clap, and soon the audience of the entire auditorium rose in a standing ovation.
The director strode up on the stage and warmly shook George’s hand. “We’ll take our break now,” he said into the microphone.
When she could get George’s attention, Alice, balancing her coffee cup and cinnamon roll, said quietly to him, “Was that really Jake Wang who said those things? Or was this a changeling swapped for Jake in the night by the elves?”
George laughed. “You have to be able to read your Jake,” he said. “Allow me to interpret. First, he saw no way of blocking work on the Snark, so he got out in front to lead the parade, radiating whatever reflected glory he could in the process. Second, he claimed as much credit as he could for the LEM detector as a device for discovering wormholes, and I’m sure he’ll continue to do so with rising intensity for the indefinite future. Third, he has effectively moved all work on the Snark as far from LEM as possible, sending me with it. And finally, he’s suggested that general laboratory funds and external funds be used to support whatever work is done on the Snark, meaning that LEM funds will not be spent on it. Understand now?”
“He’s moved you out of his road, so he can get on with discovering the Higgs?” Alice asked.
“Exactly,” said George. “I suppose I might have done something similar in his place.” He winked at her.
A tone sounded in the hallway, indicating that the second part of the seminar was about to begin. Together they walked back into the lecture theater.
CHAPTER 6.2
Contact
THE DISTINGUISHED visitors who had participated in the Snark seminar this morning stood clumped together, their attention directed at the large flatscreen mounted on the Snark laboratory wall. It displayed the bit-stream from the Snark, rendered as a 1728 by 1728 pixel bitmap image. The display changed as the bitstream came in, cycling through the same twelve images every two hours. A nearby oscilloscope showed the changing waveform of the transmission.
Alice leaned against the wall opposite the flatscreen. She had seen the images enough times to have memorized them all by now. She was growing impatient.
On the lab bench rested the now-famous Snark scintillator unit. It was connected to several cables which led to an electronics rack standing beside the bench. The electronics provided the signals and protocol for connecting the device to the local area network. As far as the network was concerned, the Snark was now just one more node.
George sat at the old-fashioned computer terminal, looking up at Roger.
“What are you waiting for, George?” Alice asked. She had a sense of being present at an historic moment. She thought again about the Snark book she intended to write and wondered what kind of advance it might bring.
“This is the moment of truth, Roger,” he said. “When I hit the RETURN key, we will have done something irreversible. We will have revealed ourselves to an alien civilization that must be far more advanced than we are. We’ll signal them that we exist and wish to communicate. Once I hit the key, the world becomes a different place. Do I really want to do it?”
Alice made rapid notes, not wanting to miss anything.
Roger looked at George. “Your options are very limited, I’m afraid. The rumors of our work have been going out like a tidal wave. Many people in other places attended the seminar this morning using remotes, and the computer mail is flying. I predict that by tomorrow there will be an Internet discussion group devoted exclusively to speculations and news about the Snark. I predict that soon an army of reporters are going to converge on the laboratory, with bureaucrats from a whole array of federal agencies not far behind. I think there are only two choices. You can initiate communications right now, or you can let a bunch of State Department or Military bureaucrats do it. Your choice, George.”
George bit his lip, and shook his head. “Shit!” he said, and hit the RETURN key.
“That may become a famous quote, George, like ‘Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes!’ or “One small step for a man ...’,” said Alice, writing more in her notebook.
“Let the record show,” said Roger, “that George said ‘I initiate this contact in the name of all humankind,’ before he hit the final keystroke.” He grinned.
The message that Roger, Wilson Mulligan, and their rapidly assembled team of SETI experts had prepared began to flow into the Snark. It had not been necessary to prepare it from a cold start. The community of radio astronomers, mathematicians, psychologists, and others interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, despite their battles with former Senator Proxmire and other members of Congress, had been refining a basic strategy for establishing contact with an alien civilization for the past four decades. Parts of that plan, of course, were irrelevant. There seemed little point in
communicating to residents of another universe the coordinates of pulsars near the solar system, for example. But most of the approach was directly applicable to the problem of contact: the sequence of smooth transitions from mathematics to physics to chemistry to biology to language to culture. A distillation of this approach, distilled to a bit stream, was now flowing down the cables and through the Snark, to emerge in another universe.
Alice backed away from the wallscreen and studied it. There was no change in the sequence of diagram. It was presently tracing the last few lines of the Snark version of the periodic table of the elements, one of the diagrams it had repeated in roughly two hour intervals for the past week. The nuclear chemists were fascinated by this diagram, which extended to element number 128, some seventeen positions beyond the place where our own periodic table of known elements terminated.
Perhaps, Alice thought, Roger was right and the communications link, if one were possible at all, would require months or years, even centuries to establish. How short could a wormhole path be that connected one entire universe with another? This could be a long wait.
The periodic table diagram on the flatscreen had just completed. Alice watched it, anticipating that the next diagram which depicted atomic orbits and transitions, would be displayed. But the flatscreen remained unchanged, with no update trace proceeding across the top, and the oscilloscope beside it now showed a green blur. Alice glanced across the room to the electronics rack. Angry red lights were flashing from the data processing modules there.
“What the hell?” muttered one of the electronics technicians as he punched at the controls of an oscilloscope. The screen of the scope flashed green and fluttered, then stabilized in a fixed trace. It showed a sequence of up-and-down rectangular traces. At the left of the screen the square cornered swings were widely spaced, but as they progressed across the screen they grew closer and closer together until they merged into a continuous blur of blue haze.
“That’s a different pattern,” Alice said, remembering the sequence of regularly spaced ones and zeroes that the Snark had been producing for the past ten days.
“Yes,” said George. He turned to Roger. “It’s a good thing you wouldn’t bet with me,” he said. “We’ve made contact. They’re obviously telling us to transmit faster.”
CHAPTER 6.3
Snark’s Egg
IT HAD been a busy week for Alice, George thought. She had backed up the SSC Laboratory’s press release about the Snark discovery with her personal account, which had been distributed internationally by Associated Press. At the press conference the day after the seminar, she had been designated as pool reporter to feed new information to the reporters that had converged on the laboratory to cover the story. And her Search article on the Snark discovery had been the magazine’s featured cover story for the week.
George had framed an enlarged copy of the Search cover. It now hung on the wall of the Snark laboratory opposite him. In the bookshelf below it was a copy of Time bearing its own cover heralding the discovery. He noticed that Alice was thumbing through a similar copy of Newsweek.
“How did Newsweek treat us?” he asked.
“Not bad,” she said, “but they did garble a few key points. They seem to think that Roger is also a member of the LEM collaboration. By the way, how is Roger? Any news?”
“I called the hospital this morning,” said George. “He’s at his apartment resting now. The doctor told me that his second seizure was worse than the first. I’m very worried.” Roger’s brilliance had been essential to the Snark contact. The doctors seemed to be having trouble establishing what his medical problem was.
George stroked his beard as he studied the terminal display. The Snark was simultaneously communicating with him, racing like a wildfire from database to database on the Internet, asking a continuous string of questions to various experts, and filling the latest in a series of ultra-high density one terabyte holographic optical platters.
The first level of the Snark download, about a terabyte of easily decoded information on the science, mathematics, biology, culture, arts, history, and philosophy of the Maker race, had already been transmitted and was being widely distributed and analyzed. Now the second level transmission was in progress. More detailed information about the Makers’ culture and science, along with information about the other civilizations that the Makers had contacted, was being received. The SSC data analysts on Team Snark were processing these new tapes offline and making the information they contained available on the Internet as quickly as they could, which was not nearly fast enough to satisfy the information-starved world tied into the network.
George pressed a switch and spoke into the microphone before him on the desk. “Tunnel Maker?” he said.
“I’m here, George,” the voice from the speaker on the desk, the voice they had come to identify as that of ‘Tunnel Maker’, said.
“I see you have been making good use of the Internet,” George said.
“Yes,” said Tunnel Maker. “Our historians have been studying your recent history, and they unexpectedly cleared up a nuclear astrophysics mystery that had been puzzling us.”
“Really?” Alice, standing behind George, said into the microphone.
“Yes,” said Tunnel Maker. “When our Bridgehead was moving through your detector, we noticed that it passed through a region of almost pure element 92, isotope 238, what you call uranium-238, I believe. The mystery was, why was there almost no trace of isotopes 234 and 235 which should be present in small concentrations. There were speculations that nucleosynthesis somehow worked in a different way in your universe than in ours.”
“We use depleted uranium in the LEM detector,” George said.
“So we deduced,” said Tunnel Maker. “We studied the history of your Manhattan Project and later nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor programs and concluded that the uranium-238 in your detector must be what was left over when the lighter isotopes were removed for bombs and reactor fuel.”
“Exactly,” said George.
“Your species has never made nuclear weapons?” Alice asked.
“No,” said Tunnel Maker, “we have weapons and conflicts, but nothing quite like yours. However, you have emerged from a very dangerous period, and you are to be congratulated. It appears to us that the enormous destructive power of the weapons you developed held your great nations in place without major conflicts long enough for the inherent problems of some of your political systems to become obvious even to their adherents. Our historians find this very interesting.”
“Yes,” said George, “we do live interesting times.” He had decided that Tunnel Maker should be told about the impact his contact was having. “You should know that you’re creating a lot of new problems here,” he said. “There’s been a stock market crash in the high technology and manufacturing sectors. The U. S. Congress is now debating a bill that would expropriate our Bridgehead and place it at Livermore, behind a wall of high security. Other countries are threatening censures, boycotts, and even military action if that is done. And our ‘open’ SSC laboratory has become an armed camp, with DOE security guards brought in from all over the country to protect us from the news media, the industrial spies, and the curiosity seekers. We on Team Snark have had to move our base of operations twice so far. We’ve now relocated below ground in a side tunnel of the ring.”
“It’s also been very exciting,” Alice chimed in. “There has been enormous coverage of your contact with us in the news media. I’ve become the ‘pool reporter’ for every news organization in the world.”
“You should not concern yourselves unduly about these problems,” Tunnel Maker said. “Change is always somewhat painful. This difficult initial phase is about to reach its successful completion.”
Alice blinked. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“We have almost completed the
transmission of the second level information. In about one more rotation of your planet our transmission stream will conclude, except to answer questions you may wish to ask us. But now, I must ask you to help me. Our Concantation of Individuals is pleased with the way things have gone so far and has reached a consensus. I am authorized to proceed with the second phase of our contact.”
“What is the second phase?” asked George.
“In a manner of speaking, I’m coming for a visit,” said Tunnel Maker. “You will need to find a quiet place for the first part of it, well away from the busy environment of your laboratory.”
“A visit?” exclaimed George. His mind raced, trying to imagine how that might happen.
“Wow!” said Alice and began to type into her lapstation.
“Just how do you propose to do that?” George asked. “Do you plan to come through the wormhole?”
“Pick up the scintillator unit and look underneath,” said Tunnel Maker.
George stood, reached out and picked up the black object.. Beneath it, a cavity had seemingly been carved out of the plastic and pressed wood of the desktop. In the cavity was a small white sphere about the size of a large marble. He studied the underside of the scintillation bar. There was a small hole there just over the place where the cavity and egg had appeared, and a thin beam of blue light emerged from it. “What is this white sphere on the table?” George asked. “Where did it come from?”
“That is my Egg,” said Tunnel Maker. “I produced it by manipulating atoms with coherent radiation. In a sense, I am contained in that Egg. Pick it up, please.”
