He said, not even sitting down, “Y’know, the only place where I can sing and people don’t throw rotten fruit at me is church.”
Irene looked startled. “I didn’t think you were religious.”
“Hey, it’s a metaphor. I pay for a place to dance, too, so-let’s go. To the Ritz.”
Her eyebrows arched in surprise. “What an oblique invitation. Puttin’ on the Ritz?”
As they danced on the patio overlooking sunset surfers, he pulled a loose strand of hair aside for her, tucking it behind her ear. She was full of chatter about work. He told her about his work on the Bullet and she was genuinely interested, asking questions. Then she went back to tales of her office intrigues. Sometimes she seemed like a woman who could survive on gossip alone. He let it run down a bit and then said, as the band struck up Begin the Beguine, “I need more time.”
She stiffened. “To contemplate the abyss of the M word?”
“Yes. I’m hot on the trail of something.”
“You didn’t call Herb Linzfield, either, did you.” Not a question.
“No.”
“Oh, fine.”
He pulled back and gazed at her lips. Lush, as always, but twisted askew and scrunched. He knew the tone. Fine. Yeah, okay, right. Fine. Go. Leave. See. If. I. Care.
****
He settled into it then, the rhythm: of thickets of detail, and of beauty coming at you, unannounced. You had to get inside the drum roll of data, hearing the software symphonies, shaped so that human eyes could make some hominid sense of it. These color-coded encrustations showed what was unseeable by the mere human eye-the colors of the microwaves. Dry numbers cloaked this beauty, hid the ferocious glory.
When you thought about it, he thought, the wavelengths they were “seeing” with, through the enormous dish eyes, were the size of their fingers. The waves came oscillating across the blunt light years, messages out of ancient time. They slapped down on the hard metal of a radio dish and excited electrons that had been waiting there to be invited into the dance. The billions of electrons trembled and sang and their answering oscillations called forth capturing echoes in the circuits erected by men and women. More electrons joined the rising currents, fashioned by the 0s and 1s of computers into something no one had ever seen: pictures for eyes the size of mountains. These visions had never existed in the universe. They were implied by the waves, but it took intelligence to pull them out of the vagrant sizzle of radio waves, the passing microwave blizzard all life lived in but had never seen. Stories, really, or so their chimpanzee minds made of it all. Snapshots. But filling in the plot was up to them.
In the long hours he realized that, when you narrow your search techniques tuned to pick up exactly what you’re looking for, there’s a danger. The phrase astronomers use for that is, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”
****
The paper on the astro-ph web site was brief, quick, three pages.
Ralph stared at it, open-mouthed, for minutes. He read it over twice. Then he called Harkin. “Andy’s group is claiming a forty-seven second peak in their data.”
“Damn.”
“He said before that they didn’t look out that far in period.”
“So he went back and looked again.”
“This is stealing.” Ralph was still reeling, wondering where to go with this.
“You can pull a lot out of the noise when you know what to look for.”
Whoosh- He exhaled, still stunned. “Yeah, I guess.”
“He scooped us,” Harkin said flatly.
“He’s up for tenure.”
Harkin laughed dryly. “That’s Harvard for you.” A long pause, then he rasped, “But what is the goddamn thing?”
****
The knock on his apartment door took him by surprise. It was Irene, eyes intent and mouth askew. “It’s like I’m off your radar screen in one swift sweep.”
“I’m…”
“Working. Too much-for what you get.”
“Y’know,” he managed, “art and science aren’t a lot different. Sometimes. Takes concentration.”
“Art,” she said, “is answers to which there are no questions.”
He blinked. “That sounds like a quotation.”
“No, that was me.”
“Uh, oh.”
“So you want a quick slam bam, thank you Sam?”
“Well, since you put it that way.”
An hour later she leaned up on an elbow and said, “News.”
He blinked at her sleepily “Uh…what?”
“I’m late. Two weeks.”
“Uh. Oh.” An anvil out of a clear blue sky.
“We should talk about -“
“Hoo boy.”
“- what to do.”
“Is that unusual for you?” First, get some data.
“One week is tops for me.” She shaped her mouth into an astonished O. “Was.”
“You were using…we were…”
“The pill has a small failure rate, but…”
“Not zero. And you didn’t forget one?”
“No.”
Long silence. “How do you feel about it?” Always a good way to buy time while your mind swirled around.
“I’m thirty-two. It’s getting to be time.”
“And then there’s us.”
“Us.” She gave him a long, soulful look and flopped back down, staring at the ceiling, blinking.
He ventured, “How do you feel about…”
“Abortion?”
She had seen it coming. “Yes.”
“I’m easy, if it’s necessary.” Back up on the elbow, looking at him “Is it?”
“Look, I could use some time to think about this.”
She nodded, mouth aslant. “So could I.”
Ralph had asked the Bologna group-through his old friends, the two Fantis-to take a scan of the location. They put the Italian ‘scopes on the region and processed the data and send it by internet. It was waiting the next morning, forty-seven megs as an zipped attachment. He opened the attachment with a skittering anxiety. The Bologna group was first rate, their work solid.
On an internet visual phone call he asked, “Roberto, what’s this? It can’t be the object I’m studying. It’s a mess.”
On- screen, Roberto looked puzzled, forehead creased. “We wondered about that, yes. I can improve the resolution in a few days. We could very well clear up features with more observing time.”
“Yes, could you? This has got to be wrong.”
A head- bob. “We will look again, yes.”
****
Forty- seven seconds…
The chairman kept talking but Ralph was looking out his window at the eucalyptus weaving in the vagrant coastal winds. Gossian was listing hurdles to meet before Ralph would be "close to tenure" -two federal grants, placing his Ph.D. students in good jobs, more papers. All to get done in a fe
w months. The words ran by, he could hear them, but he had gone into that place he knew and always welcomed, where his own faith dwelled. The excitement came up in him, first stirrings, the instinct burning, his own interior state of grace. The idea swarmed up in thick his nostrils, he blinked-
“Ralph? You listening?”
“Oh, uh, yeah.” But not to you, no.
****
He came into the physics building, folding his umbrella from a passing rain storm, distracted. There were black umbrellas stacked around like a covey of drunken crows. His cell phone cawed.
Harkin said, “Thought I’d let you know there’s not much time I can use coming up. There’s an older image, but I haven’t cleaned it up yet.”
“I’d appreciate anything at all.”
“I can maybe try for a new image tomorrow, but I’m pretty damn busy. There’s a little slot of time while the Array reconfigures.”
“I sent you the Fantis’ map-“
“Yeah, gotta be wrong. No source can change that much so fast.”
Ralph agreed but added, “Uh, but we should still check. The Fantis are very good.”
“If I have time,” Harkin said edgily.
****
Between classes and committees and the long hours running the filter codes, he completely forgot about their dinner date. So at 9 P.M. his office phone rang and it was Irene. He made his apologies, distracted, fretting. He looked tired, her forehead gray and lined, and he asked, “No…change?”
“No.”
They sat in silence and finally he told her about the Fanti map.
She brightened visibly, glad to have some distraction. “These things can change, can’t they?”
“Sure, but so fast! They’re big, the whole tail alone is maybe light years long.”
“But you said the map is all different, blurred.”
“The whole object, yes.”
“So maybe it’s just a mistake?”
“Could be, but the Fantis are really good…”
“Could we get together later?”
He sighed. “I want to look at this some more.” To her silence he added more apologies, ending with, “I don’t want to lose you.”
“Then remember where you put me.”
****
The night wore on.
Wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.
The error, he saw, might well lie in their assumptions. In his.
It had to be a runaway neutron star. It had to be a long way off, halfway across the galaxy. They knew that because the fraying of the signal said there was a lot of plasma in the way.
His assumptions, yes. It had to be.
Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly wrong?
He had used up a lot of his choppy VLA time studying the oblong shroud of a once-proud star, seen through the edge of the Bullet. It was fuzzy with the debris of gas it threw off, a dying sun. In turn, he could look at the obscuration-how much the emission lines were absorbed and scattered by intervening dust, gas and plasma. Such telltales were the only reliable way to tell if a radio image came from far away or nearby. It was tricky, using such wobbly images, glimpsed through an interstellar fog.
What if there was a lot more than they thought, of the dense plasma in between their big-eyed dishes and the object?
Then they would get the distance wrong. Just a like a thick cloud between you and the sun. Dispersing the image, blurring it beyond recognition-but the sun was, on the interstellar scale, still quite close.
Maybe this thing was nearer, much nearer.
Then it would have to be surrounded by an unusually dense plasma-the cloud of ionized particles that it made, pushing on hard through the interstellar night. Could it have ionized much more of the gas it moved through, than the usual calculations said? How? Why?
But what was the goddamn thing?
****
He blinked at the digital arrays he had summoned up, through a thicket of image and spectral processors. The blurred outlines of the old star were a few pixels, and nearby was an old, tattered curve of a supernova remnant-an ancient spherical tombstone of a dead sun. The lines had suffered a lot of loss on their way through the tail of the Bullet. From this he could estimate the total plasma density near the Bullet itself.
Working through the calculation, he felt a cold sensation creep into him, banishing all background noise. He turned the idea over, feeling its shape, probing it. Excitement came, tingling but laced with caution.
****
Andy had said, I wonder if it shows up in any earlier survey.
So Ralph looked. On an Italian radio map of the region done eleven years before there was a slight scratch very near the Bullet location. But it was faint, an order of magnitude below the luminosity he was seeing now. Maybe some error in calibration? But a detection, yes.
He had found it because it was bright now. Hitting a lot of interstellar plasma, maybe, lighting up?
Ralph called Harkin to fill him in on this and the Fanti map, but got an answering machine. He summed up briefly and went off to teach a mechanics class.
****
Harkin said on his voicemail, “Ralph, I just sent you that map I made two days ago, while I had some side time on a 4.8 GHz observation.”
“Great, thanks!” he called out before he realized Harkin couldn’t hear him. “Is it like the Fanti map?”
“Not at all.”
“Their work was pretty recent.”
“Yeah, and what I’m sending you is earlier than theirs. I figure they screwed up their processing.”
“They’re pretty careful…”
“This one I’m sending, it sure looks some different from what we got before. Kinda pregnant with possibility.”
The word, pregnant, stopped him for a heartbeat. When his attention returned, Harkin’s voice was saying, “-I tried that forty-seven second period filter and it didn’t work. No signal this time. Ran it twice. Don’t know what’s going on here.”
The email attachment map was still more odd.
Low in detail, because Harkin had not much observing time, but clear enough. The Bullet was frayed, longer, with new features. Plunging on, the Bullet was meeting a fresh environment, perhaps.
But this was from two days ago.
The Bologna map was only 14 hours old.
He looked back at the messy Bologna view and wondered how this older picture could possibly fit with the 4.8 GHz map. Had the Fantis made some mistake?
****
“Can you get me a snapshot right now?” Ralph asked. “It’s important.”
He listened to the silence for a long moment before Harkin said, “I’ve got a long run on right now. Can’t it wait?”
“The Fantis at Bologna, they’re standing by that different looking map. Pretty strange.”
“Ummm, well…”
�
�Can you get me just a few minutes? Maybe in the download interval-“
“Hey, buddy, I’ll try, but-“
“I’ll understand,” but Ralph knew he wouldn’t.
****
His home voicemail from Irene said, fast and with rising voice tone, “Do onto others, right? So, if you’re not that into me, I can stop returning your calls, emails-not that there are any-and anyway, blocking is so dodge ball in sixth grade, right? I’ll initiate the phase-out, you’ll get the lead-footed hint, and that way, you can assume the worst of me and still feel good about yourself. You can think, hey, she’s not over her past. Social climber. Shallow business mind. Workaholic, maybe. Oh, no, that’s you, right? And you’ll have a wonderful imitation life.”
A long pause, time’s nearly up, and she gasped, paused, then: “Okay, so maybe this isn’t the best idea.”
He sat, deer in the headlights, and played it over.
They were close, she was wonderful, yes.
He loved her, sure, and he had always believed that was all it took.
But he might not have a job here inside a year.
And he couldn’t think of anything but the Bullet.
While she was wondering if she was going to be a mother.
Though, he realized, she had not really said what she thought about it all.
He had no idea what to say. At a talk last year about Einstein, the speaker quoted Einstein’s wife’s laconic comment, that sometimes when the great man was working on a problem he would not speak to anyone for days. She had left him, of course. But now Ralph could feel a certain kinship with that legendary genius. Then he told himself he was being fatuous, equating this experience…
Jim Baen’s Universe Page 8
