Gambini cheerfully conceded that persons in Harry’s line of work had a valid place in the world. And, God knew, rational administrators were hard enough to come by.
It was just after nine when Harry arrived, carrying a cinnamon role for Gambini who, he knew, would not have eaten.
Cord Majeski sat in front of a monitor, his jaw pushed into one palm, while lines of characters moved down the screen. His eyes did not move with them. The others, computer operators, systems analysts, communications experts, seemed more absorbed in their jobs than usual. Even Angela Dellasandro, the project heartthrob—tall, lean, dark-eyed—stared intently at a console. Gambini picked out a spot well away from everybody and took a substantial bite out of the cinnamon role. “Harry, can you get full optical for us tonight?”
Harry nodded. “I’ve already made arrangements. All I need is a written request from you or Majeski.”
“Good.” Gambini rubbed his hands. “You’ll want to be here.”
“Why?”
“Harry, that is a very strange object out there. In fact, I’m not sure it should exist at all.” He leaned against a worktable piled high with printouts. Behind him, centered on a wall covered with photos of satellites, shuttles, and star clusters, was an Amtrak calendar depicting a switcher in a crowded freight yard. “In any case, it certainly shouldn’t be where it is—way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. Harry, stars don’t form between the galaxies. And they also don’t wander out there. At least we’ve never seen one before.”
“Why not?” asked Harry. “I’d expect a galaxy to throw one loose once in a while.”
“The escape velocities are too high.”
“How about an explosion? Maybe it was blown free.”
“That’s a possibility. But that sort of catastrophe would also have scattered the system. This thing’s a binary.
“There’s another mystery: it appears to have come from the general direction of the Virgo Cluster.”
“And—?”
“The Virgo Cluster is sixty-five million light-years away from where Beta—that’s the pulsar—is now. The system is moving away from it at about thirty-five kilometers per second. That’s slow, but the point is that the vectors don’t converge. We’re sure it didn’t originate in Virgo, but the stars aren’t old enough to have got where they are from anywhere else. And I say that despite the fact that Alpha, the red giant in the system, is extremely old.” Gambini leaned toward Harry, and his voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “There’s something else you should know.”
Harry waited, but Gambini slid off the table. “My office,” he said.
It was paneled in red cedar, decorated with awards the physicist had received over the years: the 1989 Nobel for his work in high energy plasmas; the Man of the Year in 1991 from Georgetown; Beloit College’s appreciation of his contributions to the development of the Faint Object Spectrograph; and so on. Before transferring to NASA from his former position with the Treasury Department, Harry had indulged in the bureaucratic tradition of hanging plaques and certificates of recognition on his walls, but his stuff had looked pathetic by contrast: the Treasury Department’s Exceptional Achievement Award, a diploma from a three-day executive development program, that sort of thing. So Harry’s eyewash now rested in a box in his garage.
The office was located behind a broad glass panel that overlooked the forward compartment of the L-shaped operating spaces. The floor was covered with a thick woven carpet. His desk was awash in paper and books, and several yards of printout had been draped over a chair back. Gambini snapped on a Panasonic stereo set in a bookcase; the room filled immediately with Bach.
He waved Harry to a seat, but seemed unable to settle into one himself. “Beta,” he said, crossing the room to close the door, “has been transmitting bursts of X-rays in an exceedingly regular pattern during the two years we’ve been observing it. The details don’t matter, but the intervals between peaks have been remarkably constant. At least that was the situation until this morning. I understand Hoffer informed you that the signal stopped altogether last night.”
“Yes. That’s why I came in.”
“It was down for precisely four hours, seventeen minutes, forty-three seconds.”
“Is that significant?”
Gambini smiled. “Multiply it by sixteen, and you get Beta’s orbital period.” He watched Harry expectantly and was clearly disappointed at his lack of response. “Harry,” he said, “that’s no coincidence. The shutdown was designed to attract attention. Designed, Harry. And the duration of the shutdown was intended to demonstrate intelligent control.” Gambini’s eyes glittered. His lips rolled back to reveal sharp white teeth. “Harry,” he said, “it’s the LGM signal! It’s happened!”
Harry shifted his weight uncomfortably. LGM meant little green man: it was shorthand for the long-sought communication from another world. And it was a subject on which Ed Gambini had long since lost all objectivity. The negative results of the first SKYNET survey of extrasolar planetary atmospheres two years before had broken the physicist. And Harry suspected he had never entirely recovered. “Ed,” he said carefully, “I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.”
“Goddammit, Harry, I’m not jumping to conclusions!” He started to say something else, caught himself, and sat down. “There is no other explanation for what we’ve seen. Listen,” he said, suddenly calm, “I know you’re thinking I’m a loony old bastard. But it doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. There’s no question about it!” He looked defiantly at Harry, daring him to object.
“That’s the evidence?” asked Harry. “That’s all there is?”
“It’s all we’ll ever need.” Gambini smiled tolerantly. “But yes, there’s more.” His jaws worked, and an expression that was a mixture of smugness and anger worked its way into his features. “Nobody’s going to pack me off to a shrink this time.”
“What else is there?”
“The consistency of the pattern is on the record. With minor variations, in intensity and pulse width and so on, the basic sequence of events never changed during the several months we’ve been observing Beta. There were almost always fifty-six pulses in a series, and the series repeats every three and a half seconds. Slightly less, actually.” He churned energetically around the room while he talked, waving his arms and jabbing fingers in Harry’s direction. “Son of a bitch, I can’t believe it yet. Anyhow, after we recovered the signal this morning, we could still recognize the pattern. But there was an odd difference. Some of the pulses were missing, but only from alternate series. And always the same pulses. It was as if you took, say, the Third Concerto and played it straight through, and then played it again, with some notes removed, but substituting rests rather than shortening the composition. And you continued to do this, complete, and truncated, with the truncated version always the same.” He took a notepad out of the top drawer and wrote 56 at the top. “The number of pulses in the normal series,” he said. “But in the abbreviated series, there are only forty-eight.”
Harry shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ed. I’m lost.”
“All right, forget all that. It’s only a method for creating a recurring pattern. Now, what is particularly interesting is the arrangement of the missing pulses.” He printed the series: 3, 6, 11, 15, 19, 29, 34, 39, 56. His gray eyes rose to meet Harry’s. “When it’s finished, we get fifty-six pulses without the deletions, and then the series runs again.”
Harry stared back. “Say it in English, Ed.”
Gambini looked like a man who’d won a lottery. “It’s a code,” he said.
Two years before, when SKYNET had gone operational, Gambini had expected to solve the basic riddles of the universe. Life in other places, the creation, the ultimate fate of the galaxies. But it hadn’t happened that way, of course. Those questions still remained open. He had been particularly interested, for philosophical reasons, in the role of life in the cosmos. And SKYNET had revealed, for the first time, terrestrial worlds circling dista
nt stars. Gambini and Majeski, Wheeler at Princeton, Rimford at Cal Tech, and a thousand others had looked at the photos and congratulated one another. Planets floated everywhere! Few stars seemed so poor, so sterile, as to be destitute of orbiting bodies. Even multiple star systems had somehow produced, and held on to, clusters of worlds. Often they fluttered in eccentric orbits, but they were there. And Gambini had offered Harry his opinion one Sunday afternoon in late April that he no longer had any doubts: the universe was rich with life.
That optimism had all changed in the long shadow thrown by the Faint Object Spectrograph. Light analysis showed that planets of terrestrial mass located within the biozone of a star (at a distance from their primary that would allow liquid water to exist) tended to be like Venus rather than Earth. The data had, in fact, revealed the nearby universe as an unremittingly hostile place, and the Saganesque vision of a Milky Way populated with hundreds of thousands of life-bearing planets had given way to the dark suspicion that humans were, after all, alone. Gambini’s dream dissipated, and, ironically, it was his own work with the Faint Object Spectrograph that had made the knowledge possible.
It was a grim time, traumatic for the Agency and for its investigators. If, after all, there was nothing out there but rock and gas, why were the taxpayers pumping money into long-range projects? Harry had no inclination to go through it again. “I think we need better evidence,” he said, as gently as he could.
“Do you?” Gambini’s tongue flicked across his lips. “Harry, I don’t think you’ve looked closely at the transmissions.” He pushed the pad on which he’d scrawled the numbers closer to Harry, picked up the phone, and punched in a number. “We’d better tell Quint,” he said.
“What about the series?” asked Harry. “And by the way, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get the Director out here.” Quinton Rosenbloom was NASA’s operations chief, now also wearing the hat of Director at Goddard. An automobile accident a few weeks before had left the position suddenly empty. The change in leadership at this time was unfortunate: the old Director had known Gambini well and would have been tolerant of this latest aberration. But Rosenbloom was an old-line conservative, utterly dedicated to rock-bound good sense.
Harry examined the numbers, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Rosenbloom was not available. Harry’s experience had taught him that Rosenbloom was seldom available on Sunday mornings. Gambini’s correct course would have been to leave some indication of the nature of the emergency. That would have resulted in a response within half an hour or so. But he disliked Rosenbloom and consequently failed to exercise his usual tact. He directed the person at the other end to have Rosenbloom call “when he gets in.”
“I assume there’s some sort of sequence,” Harry said.
The physicist nodded. “Of the most basic sort. At the start of the series, there are two pulses, set off by the pulse that does not appear. Then two more, and then four. An exponential group. Followed by the three that appears between sites eleven and fifteen, another three between fifteen and nineteen, and a nine between nineteen and twenty-nine. Two-two-four. Three-three-nine. Four-four-sixteen. Could anything be clearer?”
Quint Rosenbloom was overweight, rumpled, and ugly. He needed his glasses adjusted and could have used a competent tailor. Nevertheless, he was an administrator of considerable ability. He’d come to NASA from COSMIC, the Computer Software Management and Information Center at the University of Georgia. His initial assignments had encompassed systems integration for the Ground Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network. But the application of bureaucratic pressure appealed to his mathematical instincts: he enjoyed wielding power.
He did not generally approve of theorists. They tended to get lost easily, and their hold on everyday reality, slippery in the best of times, inevitably made them unreliable. He recognized their value (much, perhaps, as the theorists recognized the value of the signature on their paychecks); but he preferred to stay at least one level of management above them.
Ed Gambini was a classic example of the type. Gambini was addicted to asking the sort of ultimate questions about which one could speculate endlessly with no fear of ever arriving at a solution. That was not really a problem in itself, of course, but it biased one’s judgment sufficiently to render it, in Rosenbloom’s view, unreliable.
He had vigorously opposed Gambini’s appointment, but his own superiors, whose scientific backgrounds were limited, were unduly impressed by the physicist’s Nobel Prize. Moreover, in an action that Rosenbloom could not bring himself to forgive, Gambini had gone over his head. “The little bastard knew I wouldn’t have given him the job,” he once told Harry. There’d been a fight, and in the end Rosenbloom had been overruled.
If Rosenbloom doubted Gambini’s results that Sunday morning, it was not because he felt that such a thing wasn’t possible, but rather that it simply did not happen in well-run government agencies. He also sensed that, if events were permitted to take their course, he would shortly face one of those fortunately rare situations in which there would be considerable career risk, with little corresponding opportunity for advantage.
His irritation was obvious from the moment he arrived at the operations center. “He doesn’t like being called out on a Sunday,” Gambini remarked, while both men watched him stride stiffly through the whitewashed door. But Harry suspected it went deeper than that. Rosenbloom had a long memory and no inclination to go another round with Gambini’s demons.
It was warm: he had a worn blazer slung over one shoulder, and his knit shirt was stuffed into his pants in a manner that suggested he’d come directly from the golf course. He passed through operations like a shabbily dressed missile and exploded quietly in Gambini’s office. “I don’t have a better explanation for your dots and dashes, Ed. But I’m sure someone else will. What’s Majeski’s opinion?”
“He can’t offer any alternative.”
“How about you, Harry?”
“It’s not his field,” observed Gambini, nettled.
“I asked Harry.”
“I have no idea,” said Harry, his own irritation rising.
Rosenbloom extracted a cigar from an inside pocket of his coat. He inserted it unlit into his mouth. “The Agency,” he said reasonably, “has a few problems just now. The rest of the moon operation’s going to hell. The Administration is unhappy with our foot-dragging over the military’s pet projects. The Bible-thumpers are still suspicious of us, and I don’t need to remind you that there’s a presidential election next year.”
That had been another embarrassment for the Agency. The year before, NASA investigators, using SKYNET, had got on the track of a quasar they’d suspected of being the Big Bang and had begun issuing periodic reports that the press promptly labeled Creation bulletins. The Agency’s position had become untenable when Baines Rimford, at Cal Tech, had said he no longer believed a Big Bang had occurred. “The Administration’s in trouble with the taxpayers, the Congress, and most of the fringe groups in the country,” Rosenbloom went on. “I suspect the only solid support the White House has left comes from the NRA. Now, it strikes me, gentlemen, that the President would just love to have a cord wherewith to strangle this organization. To take us by our collective throats and hang us out to dry. If we start talking about little green men and we’re wrong, we’re going to be handing him the rope.” He was sitting on a reversed wooden chair, which he tilted forward. “Maybe,” he added, “even if we’re right.”
“We don’t have to make any statement at all,” objected Gambini. “Just release the transmissions. They’ll speak for themselves.”
“They sure as hell will.” Rosenbloom was the only person in the organization who would have taken that tone to Gambini. There was much about the Director’s methods for handling subordinates that reminded Harry of a tractor-trailer with a loose housing. “Ed, people are already jittery. There’s a lot of war talk again, the economy’s a mess, and we’ve recently had a nuclear demonstration by the IRA. The Presiden
t is not going to want to hear about Martians.”
Harry’s eyes were beginning to water. Pollen was getting down into his throat, and he sneezed. He felt slightly feverish and began to wish he could get home to bed. It was, after all, a Sunday.
“Quinton.” Gambini twisted the name slightly, drawing out the second consonant but he kept a straight face. “Whoever is on the other end of that transmission is far away. Far away. There were cavemen here when that signal left Altheis.”
“It is my earnest desire,” Rosenbloom continued, as if no one else had spoken, “that this entire issue should just go away.”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Gambini.
“No, I don’t suppose so.” Rosenbloom’s chair creaked. “Harry, you didn’t answer my question. Would you be willing to stand up there and tell two hundred million Americans that you’ve been talking to Martians?”
Harry drew a deep breath. He didn’t like to be perceived as opposing Gambini on his own grounds. Still, it was hard to believe the entire thing wouldn’t turn out to be a defective flywheel somewhere. “It’s like UFO’s,” he said, trying to be diplomatically noncommittal, but realizing too late that he was saying the wrong thing. “You can’t really take them seriously until somebody parks one in your back yard.”
Rosenbloom closed his eyes and allowed a picture of contentment to settle across his features. “Carmichael,” he said reasonably, “has been here longer than any of us. He has an instinct for survival that I admire, and he has the best interests of the Agency at heart. Ed, I suggest you listen to him.”
Gambini, stationed behind his polished desk, ignored Harry. “What Admin thinks is irrelevant. The fact is that nothing in nature creates exponential sequences.”
Rosenbloom chewed the unlit cigar, removed it, turned it between his thumb and forefinger, and flipped it into a wastebasket. (Gambini’s disapproval of smoking was public knowledge, and Harry could not miss the implied derision in the Director’s actions.) “You’re wrong, Ed,” he said. “You spend too much time in observatories. But Harry understands the realities here. How badly do you want to see SKYNET finished? How important are the Mare Ingenii telescopes?”
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