The Lure

by Bill Napier

  ‘You’re not going to keep the scientists in the castle quiet for long.’

  ‘Quite, quite. Still, this dark matter operation is financed by my ministry through PPARC, which means that I have the ultimate say, even if I hardly knew the damn thing existed a week ago.’

  ‘Simon, this is an issue for the whole of humanity. It’s too big for the Whitehall secrecy mindset, standard issue. You cannot and should not put the lid on this.’

  Sangster gave an urbane smile. ‘You’re out of date, David. We have an ethos of open government these days, haven’t you heard?’

  Maddox persisted. ‘Try to muzzle this and the international scientific community will come down on you like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘Unless we succeed in muzzling it, in which case no one will ever know.’

  ‘I doubt if you have any legal authority for blocking this result.’

  ‘Legal authority?’ Sangster was still smiling. ‘I’m talking about moral authority. Although governments do have other means of persuasion. Funding is always difficult these days.’

  ‘Am I being blackmailed here?’

  ‘Goodness, let’s not get draconian. But if this discovery is real it touches on matters which go far beyond mere scientific interest.’

  ‘Indeed, Simon. Such as whether we’re here for a purpose, how the existence of other life affects the great religions and our views about God’s purpose and where we fit into it, how our future would be bound up by a civilisation far in advance of our own…’

  ‘Ask the Mayans or the Navajo what happens when the weak and strong come into contact.’

  ‘That’s human history. This could lift us out of that.’

  ‘We will not rush to the media. Decisions about this will be made by HMG, not by some naive academics round a table at this Academy of Whatsit.’ Sangster snapped his fingers, and one of the waiters jerked into motion. ‘Security is the first priority. We’ll probably have to bring MI6 into this.’

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘All sorts of reasons, David,’ Sangster replied vaguely. ‘Because we ought to make sure that communication with this castle is secure. Because we don’t want our American cousins jumping the gun on this one. And after all, if these aliens exist, we are dealing with a foreign power.’

  ‘But look at what Gibson says here. They’re about to activate paras three and four of the protocol.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘They’ll inform observers worldwide through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, Commission 51 of the International Astronomical Union, and a dozen other bodies of that sort. And the Secretary General of the United Nations.’

  Sangster’s eyelids half shut; to Maddox, he was now looking positively reptilian. His lordship murmured, ‘Will they, indeed?’

  They made their way on to the pavement outside while the busy Piccadilly traffic roared past. An empty black taxi appeared and the Minister waved at it. It U-turned smoothly to a halt. Sangster opened its door and turned. ‘Give you a lift?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m only going to Carlton House Terrace.’

  The Royal Society, Sangster thought. Full of damned chattering scientists. ‘David, unless and until I say otherwise, you must forget about this whole business. Consider that to be an order.’ In the back of the taxi, he wound the window down. ‘And we never had this conversation.’

  * * *

  ‘Joseph? Sally Morgan here.’

  Joseph Pembroke could never quite hide the surge of pleasure he felt whenever he heard her voice. He had known Sally Morgan from the remote past, when his hair was long and her skirt, he remembered well, was short. She was a cheerful, petite high-flier in Christ’s College who could down a pint with the best of them. Her voice was twenty years older now, and its carefree tone was tinged with something he couldn’t identify, but it still triggered distant memories – picnics by the Cam, dangerous winter climbs in Glencoe, the Flying Club, and of course that unforgettable overnight berth in the ferry to Dieppe … ‘Good afternoon, Sally.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to the PM, Joseph.’

  The Prime Minister’s PPS pulled a large black desk diary towards him. He glanced at his watch – it showed 3.40 p.m. – before running a manicured fingernail down the afternoon schedule, pencilled in by Anne Broughton, the Diary Secretary, with a couple of entries made by one of the Garden girls.

  ‘But you saw him this morning.’

  ‘Something’s turned up in the interval.’

  ‘And it can’t wait until your next Wednesday session?’

  ‘No, I must see the Prime Minister today.’

  ‘You’re an audacious little minx.’ Pembroke said it lightly, but there was something in her voice. ‘The PM’s with Nicole at the moment, then he’s straight into a session with Sir Crispin and the Foreign Secretary to discuss the Iraq campaign. There’s not a gap in his diary.’

  ‘What about the evening?’

  ‘He’s at the Guildhall dining with the Lord Mayor and the director of the new opera house, along with assorted actors and showbiz types. Then he formally opens the opera house and sits through an evening of modern ballet.’

  ‘He doesn’t strike me as a ballet lover, Joseph.’

  ‘I don’t know which he loathes more: modern ballet or the Lord Mayor.’

  ‘Dear Joseph, who could take offence? Some day you’ll be stuffed and exhibited in the Victoria and Albert.’

  ‘Then he’s back to Number Ten and, I assume, a stiff whisky and bed. I don’t see how to squeeze you in.’

  ‘You’ve never had any problem squeezing me before, Your Grace.’

  Pembroke laughed. It was a reference to The Bishop and the Chorus Girl, a bawdy undergraduate play in which they had played the principal parts. The nicknames had stuck for years.

  ‘I have to see him.’ Again, that undertone in her voice.

  ‘Maybe after he gets back. I’ll have a word with him.’

  ‘I’d be very grateful.’

  ‘Consider it done. Be in the Private Office at ten o’clock tonight.’

  ‘I’ll use the Garden entrance.’

  ‘By the way, Sally…’

  Cautiously: ‘Umm?’

  ‘How grateful is “very grateful”?’

  The Head of MI6 gave a deep-throated chuckle. ‘Oh sir, Oi be a simple country lass.’

  12

  Icosahedron

  ‘It must be their home planet.’ Svetlana was waving them over impatiently, her face lined with excitement.

  There was a rush to her terminal, and a collective gasp. Shtyrkov laughed, shouted ‘Ne figa sebe!’ and clapped his hands. Petrie, looking over her shoulder at the image, shouted, ‘Wow! Wow! Wow!’

  The image was roughly spherical, like a dimpled ball. It was made up of thousands of tiny spheres touching each other. The little spheres were red, yellow or blue. Two enormous blue starry eyes stared at them, along with a big round blue mouth. The spherelets lining the eyes and mouth were yellow, making the face look as if it had yellow eyeshadow and lipstick.

  ‘It’s like the Man in the Moon,’ Svetlana said. She pressed some keys and the round head shook slowly from side to side, then nodded up and down. Finally it turned slowly through a full rotation, showing an upside-down face on the far hemisphere.

  The terrain was deeply sculptured with canyons and mountains, the cavities being filled with the blue spherelets, the mountain peaks the red ones; the little yellow spheres occupied the middle heights.

  ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I just ran your program. I stacked the time slices as far as the next big gap in the flow.’

  ‘The little balls – are these my dots?’

  ‘No, Tom, it’s more complicated than that. There are hundreds of your dots inside each ball. But they were combined in just four basic ways, four patterns. So to simplify things, to get an image we could visualise, I replaced each pattern by a ball. Four patterns, four colours. I chose red, yellow, green and blue at ran
dom, and I expanded the balls until they touched and that’s what I got.’

  ‘Not bad for a wiring technician, Svetlana.’

  She smiled happily.

  ‘But there were four colours, you said. Where’s the fourth? The green?’

  ‘Inside the planet. You can’t see the green spheres.’

  ‘A planet with life needs water,’ Gibson asserted. ‘So the low areas are probably oceans. Blue was a lucky choice.’

  Petrie said, ‘Six oceans, regularly spaced, all the same size. It seems artificial somehow.’

  ‘They’ve terraformed their planet,’ Gibson suggested.

  ‘Can you zoom in on it?’ Petrie asked. ‘Anywhere on the surface.’

  A little wedge of lip grew until it filled the screen: a mass of coloured ping-pong balls.

  ‘Now can you do a contour map on that? They must have given us a graph-drawing package.’

  Svetlana created a fresh window on the screen and threw up a long list of programs. ‘I don’t recognise anything there.’

  ‘Mathematica. I can work it.’ Svetlana vacated her chair, which creaked slightly as Shtyrkov sat on it. He typed at the keyboard for a minute, then redisplayed the wedge of planet. Now the ping-pong balls disappeared and were swiftly replaced by an irregular, contoured surface.

  ‘It’s amazingly mountainous,’ Svetlana said. ‘Look at those cliffs.’

  ‘Where is this planet?’ Gibson wanted to know.

  Freya moved back to her terminal. ‘The zones are still narrowing down. At the moment they’re constellation-sized. Okay, if the particles came through the lake from above, their source is somewhere in Ursa Major. If they came up from below, it’s in maybe Tucana or Phoenix.’

  ‘How long before you get a definite answer?’

  ‘A couple of hours, Charlie.’

  ‘Two hours?’

  ‘It’s a big job.’

  ‘Is there anything interesting in the two zones so far?’

  ‘Plenty. The Whirlpool galaxy, the 47 Tucanae cluster, Nubecula Minor…’

  ‘I mean from the ET point of view, as well you know.’

  ‘Charlie, I can’t rule out anything right now.’

  ‘Guess, will you?’ Gibson’s tone was exasperated.

  ‘I suppose there’s 47 Ursa Majoris,’ Freya said doubtfully.

  ‘Which is?’

  She spoke while she typed. ‘It’s a G1 main sequence star, like the Sun only slightly hotter. It has two known planets around it. Too far away to see directly and we only know they’re there because they make the star wobble. But the planets are gas giants, bigger than Jupiter, and they certainly won’t look like that.’

  ‘It could have other planets?’

  ‘Yes, Charlie, but so could millions of other stars in the zones.’

  ‘How far away is it?’

  ‘Let me see.’ A slender finger skimmed down the screen. ‘Forty-six light years. Not too distant.’

  ‘47 Ursa Majoris,’ Gibson said. ‘It sounds good. I have a gut feeling about it.’

  ‘My gut is bigger than yours,’ Shtyrkov said. ‘And it tells me the odds are against this star.’

  ‘Before I contact the government I want a positive identification of this planet.’

  ‘And you’ll want it for the press release,’ Shtyrkov suggested. ‘It will enhance the drama.’

  ‘The press release, yes. I must put something together.’ Gibson scurried towards a corner desk, leaving Petrie to wonder if the Russian had cunningly manoeuvred Gibson out of their hair.

  Petrie sat at a terminal and hacked into the enormous file, randomly entering about halfway through. He ran the movie briefly; more swirling dots appeared, but now he knew, if not the mind of the signallers, at least the way they dumbed the message down. He sliced time, stacked it and this time it didn’t work; there was no picture, no pleasing shape, just a haphazard swarm of dots.

  ‘They’re sending a different sort of message.’ Shtyrkov was leaning over his shoulder.

  ‘I think so, Vash. Something that doesn’t lend itself to geometric visualisation.’

  ‘Like something in four or more dimensions?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The Russian laid a sympathetic hand on Petrie’s shoulder. ‘Back to the theological library, young man.’

  ‘To hell with the theological library.’ Petrie started to hack randomly into other points in the file, a small boy lost in an Aladdin’s cave of mysteries.

  After an hour he rubbed his face, stretched, and went out to the castle grounds. The sky was blue. Icicles of lethal size were hanging down from the high rooftops and he wondered idly if the warming air would send them hurtling down. He wandered across to the parapet, looked out over the countryside and almost immediately had a disturbing thought. He turned smartly back into the office. Gibson was scribbling; the others were doing their things at terminals and there was an air of quiet concentration.

  ‘Svetlana, can you throw up those canyons and mountains again?’

  She obliged.

  ‘The regularity’s amazing. Can you go back to the full view now?’

  The Man in the Moon reappeared.

  ‘Look at the edges. It’s not exactly spherical. There are flattish plains, like continental plates, as well as bumps all over.’

  ‘Obviously.’ Gibson had rejoined them. ‘It’s a very mountainous planet.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ Petrie said.

  Freya was looking at the screen with narrowed eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking that, too, Tom. In fact, I’m way ahead of you.’

  Petrie said, ‘Yes! It’s bizarre.’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt your private telepathy,’ Gibson said, ‘but would either of you people care to let me in on the secret?’

  Freya unconsciously flipped her hair back over her shoulder. ‘Charlie, the Earth is eight thousand miles across and Mount Everest is six miles high. It’s a tiny blip on the surface. That’s because gravity is too strong to support a taller mountain. If Everest was pushed up much higher, the rock at its base would crumble.’ She pointed at a couple of places on the screen. ‘Look at the height of these mountains. They couldn’t exist on an Earth-sized planet.’

  ‘So gravity’s weaker there. It’s a small planet.’

  ‘Yes, a very small one. It couldn’t be more than a thousand kilometres across, say like a giant comet or an asteroid. That’s your reasoning, Tom?’

  Petrie nodded.

  Freya continued. ‘But an asteroid’s gravity is too weak to hold on to an atmosphere. Any body of liquid water would long since have been lost to space. And you’ve been telling us that water is essential for life.’

  Svetlana looked meditatively at the screen. ‘How could any sentient being be content to live on a dry airless hunk of rock?’

  Freya said, ‘It’s not a hunk of rock, Svetlana.’

  Shtyrkov looked at the image, and then at Freya and Petrie. ‘Is it possible?’

  ‘Let me in on it,’ Gibson pleaded.

  Petrie squeezed Svetlana’s shoulder. ‘Make it tumble.’

  Svetlana typed a few symbols and the Man in the Moon, mouth agape, tilted and disappeared, reappearing from time to time in random orientations.

  ‘Look closely,’ Petrie said.

  Svetlana said, ‘It’s not a sphere.’

  ‘No. It’s an icosahedron.’

  ‘A what?’ Gibson was looking blank.

  ‘It’s made up of twenty triangular plates joined together. Look at it. See how it keeps coming back to the same shape. That’s because it looks exactly the same from sixty different orientations. It’s one of the Platonic solids.’

  ‘Plato?’ Gibson repeated in exasperation. ‘Tom, are we on different planes of reality or what?’

  ‘Charlie, an icosahedron is one of the most beautifully symmetric solid forms. Plato wanted to understand the world in terms of mathematics and harmony. He believed that tetrahedron, cube, octahedron and icosahedron made up earth, air,
fire and water. It’s all there in his Timaeus.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That the signallers have read Timaeus? That they’ve shaped their planet like a Platonic bloody solid?’

  Petrie shook his head. ‘That’s not a planet, Charlie. It’s a virus.’

  13

  Moscow Chatline

  Phone ringing.

  Its rasp penetrated layers of sleep and merged with a bizarre dream in which she was floating above a TV quiz show. An uncomprehending eyelid dragged itself open; green numbers on a bedside clock read 2.10 a.m.

  Phone ringing, at ten past two in the morning.

  Dasha! There’s been an accident!

  She dragged herself fully awake. A sense of dread washing over her, she threw back the blankets and stumbled through to the tiny living room.

  Phone still ringing.

  The window was partially open and a black electric cable snaked through the gap down to the battery of a silver Niva five flights below: it was the only way to ensure that her car would start in the minus thirty degrees of a Moscow winter. But the night air from this Moscow winter was drifting in through the gap and she gasped as she opened the living-room door and hurried towards the telephone. The sound of traffic, still rumbling at this hour, came up from the street below.

  Still ringing.

  Don’t stop!

  She banged a shin painfully on the edge of a low table. Keep ringing. I’m almost there!

  She found it, dropped the receiver, picked it up, trembling.

  Professional voice, deep male: ‘Tatyana Maranovich?’ A doctor or a surgeon. Dasha was in some hospital bed. No. This was a policeman. Her daughter was lying on a mortuary slab somewhere.

  Tanya’s voice and hands shook uncontrollably. ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Vashislav Shtyrkov. I want to speak to Professor Velikhov. The duty clerk at the Academy referred me to you. May I have his home phone number?’

  Relief and anger struggled in her head, and relief won: Dasha was all right, probably tucked up with Alexei somewhere. Suddenly the bitter cold, which she had ignored, became an issue. ‘Vashislav Shtyrkov, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘I know.’