by Bill Napier
‘I can’t give the Professor’s name out to a stranger. I could lose my job.’
‘Let me give you an assurance on that: you will lose it if you don’t.’
‘Can you tell me what this is about?’
‘No.’
‘At least tell me who you are.’
‘A colleague, from the old days.’
Something stirred in Tanya’s mind. ‘Are you the one who called the Professor about that castle in Slovakia?’
‘I am the one. Now will you give me his number?’
‘No, I’m not allowed to do that. But if you give me yours I’ll relay it to him.’
‘That will suffice. But you must give it to him now.’
‘At this hour? The Professor will not thank me for that.’ She was now shivering inside her thick flannel nightgown.
‘On the contrary, Tanya Maranovich, if you call him now he will bring you lilies from the Nile and sunshine from Mexico.’
* * *
Georgi Velikhov, as befitted the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had a villa in the Gorki-9 district of Moscow. The villa came with a maid and a cook, six bedrooms and government-issue furniture. His neighbours were diplomats, high government officials and, not two kilometres away, was the fazenda of Mikhail Isayevich Ogorodnikov, President of Russia.
And the central heating stayed on all night. Apart from anything else, the house was full of children: over the New Year, Velikhov was playing Father Frost to his wife Masha, his three daughters and their husbands, and nine grandchildren.
So it was that, although it was three in the morning and the air outside was colder than a domestic freezer, the patriarch was warm and comfortable in a studded green leather chair in his study. A stove, which he had banked up with wood for an overnight slow burn, was burning brightly, and a green shaded lamp suspended from the ceiling was throwing a harsh light over a large leather-topped desk.
He was on the telephone for over an hour. Most of the time he listened, but now and then he would fire off a question in a staccato tone.
He didn’t hear Masha come into the study, didn’t notice his four-year-old granddaughter standing at the open door in a pink nightdress, finger in mouth and hand on the top of her head until Grandmother Masha picked her up and carried her back to bed.
At the end of the call he noticed the hot chocolate in front of him with surprise. It had gone cold but his mouth was dry with talking and excitement and he gulped it down.
Velikhov stood up, stretched briefly, and then paced up and down for some minutes. The Kremlin, of course, would have a duty officer.
Good morning, I want to speak to the President on an urgent matter.
Certainly. I’ll rouse the President’s Chief of Staff now.
Alexy? I believe we’ve been contacted by an alien intelligence.
Thank you, Academician Velikhov. I too find a few Stolichnayas quite heart-warming in this weather.
They have given us information of unbelievable economic, scientific, military and medical importance.
And I especially appreciate being wakened from my bed at three in the morning for a joke. A good New Year to you.
Velikhov smiled grimly and shook his head. No, I don’t think so.
In any case, Ogorodnikov was unlikely to be in the Kremlin. More probably, he was five minutes’ drive from here, tucked up with his little fat Katya; or he might be staying in his other dacha, the modest one in the Odintsovo district. Or no – didn’t he go moosehunting in Sverdlovsk at this time of year?
Sensible to wait until waking hours.
Or a dereliction of duty?
* * *
Two miles away from Tatyana Maranovich’s small flat, in a bleak basement in the Nevsky Prospekt, a young man listened to her conversation with Academician Velikhov. The Professor had seemed a bit grumpy about being wakened up; perhaps the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning had something to do with it. The call was recorded automatically and there was little for the man to do but listen, which he did while idly filling in a jumbo crossword. Given the content of the call he was not surprised when, five minutes after it had ended, another one went out from the Academician’s dacha.
The young CIA officer was alone, the Gorki-9 telephone traffic being light in the early hours. He had arrived only three weeks ago, full of enthusiasm about his Moscow posting, on the strength of his background in Van Eck monitoring. To his disappointment, he had been assigned to the ‘chatline’, the routine coverage of private calls to and from the dachas, private and government-owned, of the government officials.
Velikhov’s name and address came up quickly on the screen, but there was a few moments’ delay while the recipient’s location was traced through a satellite.
Ninety-nine per cent of it was drivel – gossip between wives, teenagers talking to each other, remote calls to children in distant places. There was an occasional diversion, the Canadian diplomat’s wife in particular: ‘Ruth’s on!’ would bring a gleeful rush to the terminal, as the calls between her and her opera house lover became ever more steamy and inventive.
No name. Some castle in Slovakia.
At this hour. Interesting.
The phonetic translator threw up the words in passable English but the CIA officer’s Russian was better than the machine’s.
He listened with growing perplexity. This wasn’t a conversation between two normal adults, it was between lunatics. He dropped the crossword and pressed the headphones lightly against his ear, frowning.
And then he smiled. Of course – he was on the receiving end of a joke, some ponderous Russian humour. They were saying, ‘Merry Christmas, Amerika, we know you’re listening in.’
But there was no humour in the voices.
His smile gradually faded. If they knew he was listening in, why tell him this through a joke? Why not use this knowledge to transmit misinformation? Why tell a tale that couldn’t be taken seriously, not for a second?
As the crazy exchange continued, it increasingly dawned on the young man that this was no joke and that if these were actors, they were damn good ones.
The call lasted over an hour. At the end of it, the CIA man took off his headphones with a sigh and scratched his head.
I’ve just intercepted this call about aliens.
Aliens?
The callers were serious.
Of course they were. How long have you been with us? Three weeks?
He shook his head. Three weeks in Moscow and either he had the coup of a lifetime, or he was the victim of a humiliating, career-damaging practical joke.
14
Kanchenjunga
‘You people are nuts.’ Little patches of damp have appeared under the armpits of Gibson’s shirt. ‘Am I supposed to go to the British government and tell them that aliens have beamed us a picture of a virus?’
Shtyrkov says, ‘It’s obviously a virus. They like to be icosahedrons.’
Petrie says, ‘We can test it. Your little coloured spheres, Svetlana.’
‘Yes. Each is a cluster of dots, hundreds of them.’
‘These dots should be proteins.’
‘Tom, I wouldn’t recognise a protein if it hit me on the nose.’
‘It’s a string of amino acids.’
‘That’s all right then.’ Svetlana is looking defiant.
‘Right. We need a biochemist.’
Gibson says, ‘No. There’s no time. And we have enough outsiders.’ He attempts a conciliatory smile at Freya and Petrie but it comes out as a leer. ‘Nothing personal.’
‘Svetlana and I will learn biochemistry tonight,’ Shtyrkov says.
Petrie says, ‘Will it take you all night?’
‘Even genius has limits. Tom, you try to decipher fresh bits of the signal.’
‘I’ll try to identify the source,’ Freya says.
‘It’s why you’re out here,’ Gibson reminds her. ‘I’ll get back to the press release.’
Shtyrkov warns Gibson: �
��You and I contact our governments simultaneously, Charlee. No jumping the gun.’
Apart from a scowl, Gibson makes no response.
Petrie says to nobody, ‘This is the biggest thing in history.’
Freya says, ‘I’d kill for a coffee.’
* * *
6 p.m. Freya says, ‘We can rule out 47 Ursa Majoris. It’s way outside the error circle.’
A little later, Petrie takes to pacing up and down like a caged lion. There is a clear patch of floor near the centre of the room, and he criss-crosses this at random, looking over at the dancing patterns taunting him on his screen. From time to time he sits on the edge of his chair, still staring at the dots.
At random, he has cut into the signal about a minute down the line. Here the patterns are different. The biology was snowflakes in a blizzard, random swirls, sometimes a handful of dots, sometimes thousands. Random and yet not random. But here, further down the signal, things are in stark contrast. The salami technique, stacking slices of time to create a figure, doesn’t work. Here the patterns are harsh and geometric. There are pentagons and pyramids, abacuses in three dimensions and jagged cliffs in four. And yet sometimes, as he pushes the movie on, the harsh geometry dissolves and the blizzard reappears.
An alien mind, reaching out to me. What are you saying? What are you telling me? What do you mean?
6.50 p.m. After forty minutes of sitting and pacing, Petrie mutters something about the theological library and disappears. He returns without explanation an hour later. The restless pacing resumes.
8.30 p.m. Shtyrkov and Svetlana say that the virus theory is looking good. The little spheres look like proteins made up of amino acids, but they don’t know enough to identify any of them or even to say if they are of a known type.
Close to midnight, they announce that the signal contains the codings for hundreds of viruses, maybe thousands. There is a brief discussion of what could possibly motivate the signallers to beam information of that sort. There are other structures of some molecular complexity, in their thousands, but they can make no sense of them. By this time Petrie, still doing the walk, is starting to mutter.
12.40 a.m. Gibson leaves the room and returns with a tray of mugs and biscuits. Snow is fluttering down, the flakes catching the light as they pass the windows.
Petrie keeps disappearing and reappearing, muttering and sometimes walking up and down with his hands on his head, his face screwed up in concentration. Now and then he scribbles on paper and then, often as not, darts out of the room, sometimes with a groan of despair. Nobody pays him any attention.
2.05 a.m. Freya’s program runs to its conclusion. She tidies up some numbers and consults star charts. The signal has come from one of two small regions of sky, in opposite directions. One of them contains a few ordinary stars. The other is deeply disturbing. She looks around furtively; everyone is busy at terminals, except for Petrie, who is still pacing, lost in his world of patterns. She thinks he looks mad, like Rasputin or somebody. She decides to keep her finding to herself until she has searched the Net for every scrap of information about the candidate sources.
3.15 a.m. Gibson finishes the first draft of his press release with a sigh. He makes a show of walking up and down, holding the paper in front of him, and reading it with every sign of adoration. Petrie seems not to see him but somehow they avoid collision. Gibson puts his hands on Svetlana’s shoulders, looks at her screen, and asks: could the double helix be human? On the face of it the question is mind-bogglingly silly, but after the day’s surprises nothing seems too bizarre. Svetlana says they’ll get on to it.
Petrie disappears again. He is beginning to look wild-eyed, but then so are the others.
3.20 a.m. Shtyrkov mentions that they haven’t eaten. He is ignored. He says, my sugar level’s going down. He gets the same response.
5.15 a.m. Svetlana turns her chair to face the centre of the room and gives a dissertation on genetics. She tells her bone-weary little audience that the human body contains a hundred million million cells, except for Vash who has twice as many as everyone else, and they’re called cells because to the early microscope men they looked like the cells of medieval monks. And each cell contains a nucleus a tenth of a millimetre across and inside each nucleus are long strands that look like worms called chromosomes, which you can just see under a powerful microscope – not that I’ve ever seen them. There are forty-six chromosomes and they occur in twenty-three pairs.
With you so far, says Gibson, leaning back in his chair and rubbing an overnight stubble.
She says that these chromosomes are made up of a long folded molecule called DNA. This DNA is like a twisted ladder, the famous double helix, with the two spines of the ladder made up of sugars and phosphates; and each spine has letters sticking out from it, one letter on each rung so that each rung has two letters, drawn from Tom’s set of four A,C,G,T.
Biochemistry sounds easy, Gibson declares.
This is how DNA turns baby food into a growing human, Svetlana tells them. The ladder unwinds and splits down its length to make two strands and the letters on the rungs are exposed. One of the strands, with its exposed letters, is active which means that each set of adjacent three letters along it attracts an amino acid but I don’t want to overload your brain, Charlie, not at this hour.
But I’m still with you, Gibson insists.
Very good, Charlie. The way a strand gets its amino acids involves messenger RNA and transfer RNA and migration out of the nucleus to fish for the amino acids in the baby food, and lots of those three-letter words acting together create chains of amino acids called polypeptides, and lots of polypeptides combined make up proteins. Since biochemistry is easy, Charlie, I expect you’re still with me and you now understand that the whole genetic code, the thing that defines you, is like a book written in three-letter words from a four-letter alphabet.
But you can only get so many three-letter words from a four-letter alphabet, Gibson says.
Sixty-four, she confirms. The book of Charlie Gibson has a vocabulary of only sixty-four words. The book of life likewise.
So how come life is so varied? Why don’t you look like a zebra?
Because you can write a very long book with sixty-four words. I said the DNA ladder was folded. There are six feet of DNA in the nucleus of a human cell. The genome is the whole code, spread around the forty-six chromosomes. There are three billion words in the genome. If I wrote the words of your genome out in normal book size it would stretch from here to London, like a thousand Bibles written out on a single line. You’re really a wonderful human being in spite of everything, Charlie.
Why forty-six?
Who knows? Apes have more than us.
Okay, so there’s this monk in a cell, and he’s swallowed forty-six worms. And Lo! the worms turn out to be long twisted ladders, and these ladders have the Book of Life written upon them in three-letter words, unto the billionth degree. But where do you go from there, Svetlana? How can you tell if that thing – Gibson points to the double helix, still tumbling on screen – is human?
The human genome’s been mapped, Charlie, all three billion words. Vash tells me the signal has clusters within clusters and so on, and if we go to the right order of clusters we’re down to the atoms, like one dot for hydrogen, twelve for carbon, sixteen for oxygen and so on. He thinks if we look at the right hierarchy of clustering – not too deep, not too shallow – we’ll be at the molecular level and we’ll be able to match it against the human genome. The human genome exists on the Web and we can access it. We’ve already started on that. We’re trying to automate the comparison to save ourselves a few centuries’ work.
So why aren’t you getting on with it? I want to know if that thing’s human or not. Freya, what have you found? And where the hell is Petrie?
Shtyrkov: Stop! Charlee, calm down. It’s six o’clock and we’re played out.
Gibson: Are you people forgetting what day this is? Thursday! Saturday’s our last full day here and
I want to announce this in London on Monday. Freya, I want a progress report today. Twelve noon.
6.01 a.m. Gibson staggers off.
* * *
In the theological library, the sound of a vacuum cleaner brings Petrie back to the real world. A middle-aged woman, with jeans, sneakers and a yellow sweater, gives him a friendly nod as she swings the industrial strength machine over the long carpet.
He has problems standing up. Into the corridor. The castle is crawling with cleaning ladies, polishing, vacuuming, dusting, swarming, dissolving. The door to the computer room is closed and a sheet of paper sellotaped to it has Cizim vstup zakázán written in big Biro letters. The room is empty, the computers switched off, and not a scrap of paper in sight.
At the foot of the stairs, swaying on his feet, Petrie finds himself staring up at the north ridge of Kanchenjunga.
15
The Observer
The angel had Freya’s face and long blonde hair, and its wings spanned the sky. It was scattering counters at amazing speed in geometric patterns over the numbers on the roulette table. There was something behind the pentagons and butterflies and intersecting doughnuts, some unifying concept trying to get out, but as Petrie’s dream faded, the idea slipped frustratingly back into his unconscious mind. A bedside clock told him he had been asleep for four hours.
The corridor was deathly quiet. There were no cleaners, and his colleagues, he supposed, were still asleep. He had the entire Hapsburg castle to himself.
He took the stairs two at a time down to the first floor. Icy air was wafting along the corridor and he saw that the door to the terrace had blown open. He walked along to close it and was surprised to see footsteps on the thin powdery snow which had settled overnight on the terrace. Someone had crossed to the battlement wall, walked alongside it and turned back to the door. He followed the trail, looking over the parapet. There was nobody to be seen and no vehicles other than the blue Dormobile belonging to Gibson and his colleagues, snow-dusted and tucked in a corner. Tyre tracks in the snow were probably from the cleaners’ van.
Something flickered at the corner of his eye and he looked sharply up at the high tower, but there was nobody. He shivered in the bleak January sunlight, damned his imagination and turned back into the warmth of the castle.
