Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

by Jack McDevitt

  “Any of them get sick?”

  “As far as I know, they’re fine. They’re claiming mental trauma, or that their health was put at risk, or some damnfool thing.”

  The beers arrived. Kristi was used to touching glasses when she dined with old friends. But Ana simply swept hers up, gazed at it sadly, and took a long swallow.

  “Don’t they sign a legal release before they go up?”

  “Yes. We’re not responsible for acts of God. And if a nearby supernova isn’t an act of God, I’ve no idea how you’d define the term. But it’ll be at least a year before we can bring back tourists. No tourists, no money. So Neugebauer and Weber and all the other telescopes are mothballed. Everyone is on unpaid leave.”

  Kristi tried her own beer. “What are you going to do in the meantime, Ana?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of places have offered me temporary positions. The University of Maryland wants me to come on board permanently.”

  “I’d consider it.”

  “You know, Kristi, I don’t think I realized how much I was going to miss him.”

  Salads came. Kristi’s was a Caesar. “I got an e-mail from him,” she said. “Right at the end. And I can’t figure it out.”

  Ann frowned. “Why not?”

  Big news in Sagittarius. A Clyde Tombaugh Special. “You have any idea what he might have meant?”

  Ana gazed at the ceiling, and then poked a fork into her salad. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Nothing you’re aware of that he was looking at in Sagittarius?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Odd.”

  “There is something, though. I’d forgotten.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He told me to make sure you read your e-mail.”

  Kristi nodded. “The center of the Milky Way,” she said, “is in Sagittarius, so that part of the sky is choked with stars. I don’t know where to begin, Ana. I don’t know what he was talking about.”

  Their dinners arrived. Ana paid no attention to the food. The door opened and eight or nine people came in, an office party. The hostess showed them into the next room. Lots of laughter and, almost immediately, a round of applause. Ana took a deep breath, and those dark intelligent eyes finally found Kristi. “I’m sorry. Whatever it was, I think Greg’s taken it with him.”

  Kristi went to the memorial service, and said a few words trying to explain what Greg had meant to her, both professionally and as a friend. Then she’d choked up, as several people had before her. She listened to the minister say how Greg was with God now, and in better hands. He was alive and well in a better place than this. She wished she could believe it.

  When it was over, she flew back to Pasadena, where she was a junior assistant professor at Caltech. She resumed work, and did her best to forget Clyde Tombaugh.

  But it didn’t take.

  Tombaugh had been born in Illinois to a family of farmers. Despite a limited formal education, he developed a fascination for telescopes at an early age. But he didn’t think highly of the telescope he’d gotten at Sears. So he’d built his own. He eventually put together his own reflector and took it to Mt. Lowell in Arizona. The observatory director was looking for an amateur astronomer to try to find Percival Lowell’s Planet X. Tombaugh hunted through thousands of photographic plates, comparing the positions of millions of celestial objects on successive nights, looking for something that moved. Looking for Pluto. On February 18, 1930, he found it.

  She put a picture of Tombaugh on her desk. Clear eyes, good features. Probably in his mid-twenties then. What did you do, Clyde, that connected with Greg?

  She got occasional e-mails from Ana, who had taken a position of some sort with the International Space Commission. Then, one evening close to Christmas, she called.

  “Hey, kid, how are you doing?” she asked. The winsome smile was back. “You spending another scintillating Saturday night at the office?”

  Kristi nodded ruefully. “Yup. It’s just the Yottabytes and me. No other way to win that Nobel before I’m forty.” Kristi stared hard at the screen. The Spacecraft Control Center logo glowed dimly over her shoulder. “Ana, are you where I think you are? How did you get up there?”

  “The yo-yo tourists settled out of court, Kristi. I came back up to Clarke yesterday with a skeleton crew. Just in time. Five months earthside almost killed me. Be happy for me, I’m alive again.”

  “I am, Ana. You know that.”

  “I have something here for you. Where did I put it?” She pretended to fumble with her e-pad. “Aha! Yes. A little something for the holidays.”

  Kristi’s e-pad beeped. She looked at what had arrived and gasped. All of Greg’s logs. “I owe you another crabcake dinner, Ana.”

  “No chance I’ll collect that meal, Kristi, unless you bring the crustaceans up here yourself on your next observing run. I’m done with Earth. Too crowded. Too dirty. Too noisy.”

  Kristi looked at the logs, and at Tombaugh’s picture.

  Greg had been up there almost continually for three years. As she paged through the transmission, she saw that she had all his observations and calibrations. Everything.

  The proprietary period was normally two years so part of it was already public. Kristi had long since thumbed through that, hoping to find something that would put her on the track of the Sagittarius sighting. But the recent stuff was something else. It had been released early, probably because of a family stipulation. Kristi scrolled through the lists, trying to get a feeling for what he’d been doing the past two years. And she discovered he’d been observing every brown dwarf in the Milky Way. My God, he was trying to prove I’d been right.

  He had also observed every brown dwarf wannabe in her thesis, at higher resolution. He’d collected a billion spectra. He worked harder than I did. A lot of his observations were of cataclysmic binary stars, and she stripped those out of the file. She also removed the obvious quasars and Seyfert galaxies that masqueraded as brown dwarfs in her survey. That got her down to twenty million objects. Well, hell, it was a start. Sagittarius occupies just over 2 percent of the sky, but it includes the dense core of the Milky Way. Deleting everything not in Sagittarius decreased the sample size to four million. But now what?

  Clyde Tombaugh’s photographic plates were her last hope, and she knew it. The plates were taken a few nights apart and Tombaugh had compared them, star by star. Pluto gave itself away by moving nightly, relative to the background stars. Greg’s reference to a “Clyde Tombaugh special” didn’t make any sense. Only solar system objects move enough in a few nights to be detectable. The nearest brown dwarf is twelve light-years away. Its nightly motion would have been far too slight for Tombaugh to have seen. Brown dwarf surveys of the early twenty-first century should have found anything closer. Greg, what did you mean?

  The riddle gnawed at her. Her other research was beginning to suffer and Sills, the department chair, was visibly worried. “You’re up for tenure in a few years, Kristi. Don’t get sidetracked by unsolvable problems. You’ve got to keep publishing.”

  Months went by with no progress and no publications.

  She called Ana. “I think he saw something that moved.”

  “But you’ve no idea what.”

  “No. I’m looking for a needle in a haystack with four million straws.”

  “It might not be as difficult as it sounds,” she said, “if you’re right, one must be different from all the others. If you examine Greg’s four million spectra for one second each, you’ll be done in seven weeks. That’s assuming you don’t eat, sleep, or bathe, but those are overrated anyway.”

  The words hit home. One must be different from the others.

  The four million Sagittarius objects were an astrophysical smorgasbord. They included twelve classes of cool variable stars whose spectra sometimes mimicked those of brown dwarfs. In her original work with brown dwarfs, she’d needed a year to eliminate these interlopers from her catalog.
Which baby did I throw out with the bathwater? Every sorting algorithm in Numerical Recipes divided the objects into one of the twelve classes. Actually, though, there were thirteen classes. Twenty-two bona fide brown dwarfs had slipped into the detritus heap, and Greg had managed to scoop them back out. For the hundredth time, she idly glanced at the first few. They were similar, late T dwarfs, with temperatures around seven hundred Kelvins, hardly worth a second look. Something clicked. These spectra were too good. The resolution and signal-to-noise were better than anything she had ever seen. How did he get such great data?

  She displayed the next six of Greg’s spectra. They were all virtual clones. Holding her breath, she overlaid all twenty-two plots on top of each other. Tiny shifts in radial velocity between them, she noted. Otherwise, they’re absolutely identical. “Let’s see where they are.” She scanned the list of celestial coordinates. All twenty-two objects lay within an area five hundred times smaller than the full moon. It can’t be a cluster of brown dwarfs because they’d have a much larger spread of radial velocities. She placed the coordinates in a plotting package, and two twists of a corkscrew stared back at her. Bingo! Not twenty-two objects. Just one.

  Kristi, you’re as dumb as a rock. She sagged into a chair, shutting her eyes tight. The enormity of what Greg had found overwhelmed her. And he’d been swept away in the middle of it. His loss was suddenly clear and crashing. She held the spectra to her chest and began to cry.

  Ana was leading the effort to reactivate the geosynchronous telescopes. There was no way to confirm or extend Greg’s discovery without Neugebauer. Kristi called and, on an encrypted line, told her what she’d found.

  Ana listened and paled. “Are you sure?” Her voice trembled.

  “I need to do some more checking. But yes, I don’t think there’s much question.”

  “Thanks, Kristi,” she said. “I’m glad you told me. It’s helpful to know what he did.” She took a deep breath. “Do you need more data? What can I do to help?”

  Kristi nodded. “The radial velocities are crucial.” She was trying hard not to sound excited. “The variations were tiny. Greg must have missed them. I need a set of high dispersion observations every six hours for a month. Can you do it?”

  Ana could. “You bet. I’ll get started tomorrow.”

  The Neugebauer data accumulated on her computer for three weeks before Kristi allowed herself to inspect it. The direct images were saturated, just as she had expected. No wonder it’s so bright. But the spectra were exquisite.

  And they confirmed her suspicions.

  She called Ana. “It’s what we thought,” she bubbled with enthusiasm as she described the results.

  “Now what?” asked Ana.

  “We need access to the coronagraph.” The coronagraph was designed to block the glare of a distant sun, allowing its planets to be seen. “Joel,” Kristi said.

  Ana nodded.

  Joel Dayan had designed and built the coronagraph at Clarke. He was on the staff at Caltech, just down the hall.

  Joel blinked in surprise as she walked into his office and shut the door. “Tongues will wag, Kristi,” he smiled.

  “You wish, big fella.” Joel was one of the brightest people Kristi had ever met. He had done breakthrough work on instrument design, was a superb classroom instructor, and had won a Shaw Foundation Prize four years earlier for his imaging of terrestrial planets in nearby star systems. In his spare time, he partnered with an airline pilot as the California state bridge champions. He was also pretty good-looking.

  “I need your help, Joel,” she said.

  He sighed. “What can I do for you, Kristi?”

  “I want to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” She described her discovery, told him yes there was no question, and no she wasn’t kidding. She showed him the new data from Ana.

  He listened, looked skeptical, nodded. “Greg’s work, you say?”

  “Yes,”

  “I never got to meet him.” He sat quietly, considering what she’d said. “My loss.”

  “Can you help?”

  “You’re asking me if the coronagraph is available.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not really. It’s never available, Kristi. You know how that is.”

  She knew. People were lined up for months ahead.

  “We’d have to get somebody to give up their time.”

  “I know,” she replied. “But you have seven days, beginning this Friday.”

  “You’re offering me a junior partnership in a risky enterprise that might be in the textbooks for centuries.” She smiled and nodded, “Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.”

  He walked into her office an hour later. “Okay,” he said. “We can do it.”

  “This Friday?”

  “Yes. But there’s a price.”

  “Sounds like the end of my virtue.”

  He laughed. “I’ll take it if it’s available. In any case, I want to go with you.”

  Three years earlier, Kristi had almost frozen to death in a snowstorm when her car slipped off the Kilimanjaro summit road. This time it was sunny right to the top. The auto-drive let them both enjoy the view. They relaxed and laughed and snacked as the pressurized car climbed more than five kilometers above the surrounding savannah. The Yuri Artsutanov Space Elevator was celebrating its thirtieth year of operation. Large banners hailing the international consortium lined the road. This would be her sixth trip up, and his tenth. Security had been beefed up since her last visit. The guards put their suitcases through X-ray, terahertz, and pion imagers. She hated being swabbed for a DNA sample. Joel just shrugged. “Standard operating procedure where I come from. Better than a lunatic bringing a polio-smallpox cocktail onboard in her own body.”

  The cable seemed to hang from infinity, contrary to the laws of common sense. Yuri’s base towers were surrounded by enormous structures extruding new nanowire ribbon. The lifting capacity was being doubled to one hundred tons. Competition from the rival elevator, the Bradley C. Edwards, anchored due south of Hawaii, remained fierce. Joel and Kristi were the only passengers, so the steward ushered them into the first-class section. Nice, she thought. This is how the other half lives. They strapped themselves in as the hatches clicked shut. The carbon nanowires stiffened and the elevator lifted away from Kibo, the summit crater. Minutes later they spotted Kigali and Kampala across Lake Victoria. The Indian Ocean came into view and the Earth became round. Venus and Saturn appeared as the sky turned dark blue, then black. Their eyes adapted to the night, and the star clouds in Sagittarius became visible. They talked, drank coffee, and enjoyed each other’s company. Toward the end of the nine-hour ride, she fell asleep on his shoulder. He stroked her cheek to wake her just before the clamps on Clarke locked the elevator in place. “Hey, kid,” he said, “it’s showtime.”

  Ana was waiting for them. She hugged Kristi and shook hands with Joel. Kristi had warned her to wait for dinner, and Ana laughed when she saw the crabcakes. A complex Stellenbosch Chenin Blanc with a hint of citrus enlivened the evening.

  Joel had stenciled HARSH MISTRESS (HM) on his coronagraph, because of the sub-nanometer precisions required to make it work. He’d anchored the core of the device to carbon-silicon nanorods in liquid helium to eliminate flexure. Cooling and testing the alignment was a three-day blur of activity. The instrument was trivial in principle—it used a small metal disk to occult the glare of a star. Its ten-billion-times-fainter planets could then be seen. Detailed images of Jupiters and Neptunes around nearby stars were like shooting fish in a barrel for HARSH MISTRESS. Joel had built HM for his Ph.D., to take the first resolved images of Earth-like exoplanets. A decade later, he had a hundred discoveries to his credit. All were like Mars or Venus, with atmospheres utterly devoid of oxygen. Religious fundamentalists were using this to “prove” that life on Earth was unique and divinely created. He rolled his eyes when Kristi teased him about it. “Nutcases,” he said. “I’ll need a bodyguard when I find an oxygen-dominat
ed terrestrial world.”

  A few months earlier, Joel had serendipitously detected two Ceres-sized asteroids orbiting Barnard’s Star. They were the first exo-asteroids known. The precious observing time they were going to use now had originally been awarded to look for more asteroids around other nearby stars. Greg and Kristi’s discovery took precedence, so Joel was going to sacrifice all seven days of his hard-won Neugebauer time to make the necessary observations. A small price for astronomical immortality, he thought. If it works. And he didn’t mind having a very attractive redhead like Kristi Lang feeling indebted to him.

  Caltech’s press officer reminded Kristi of a bulldog. His cylindrical body and stubby legs supported a square head with sad brown eyes, short golden hair, and a white beard over large jowls. Alan Boxer loved his job and the eclectic scientists whose work he publicized. This morning promised to be a high point in his career. Two hundred media representatives were munching donuts and downing coffee in Feynman Hall, waiting for him to begin the press conference. He nodded, and the Astrophysics chair of Caltech stepped to the podium.

  Albert Sills was beaming. He wore a vest that portrayed the Earth on a navy blue background of stars. It was his way of signaling an Event. “Most scientists count themselves lucky if they make one significant discovery in a lifetime.” He gazed out across the audience. “Professors Kristi Lang and Joel Dayan have each done that already. She has found a type of star that nature cannot manufacture. That might be synthetic. He has taken the first pictures and spectra of Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. All these planets are barren. Her results suggest that intelligent life exists in the cosmos. His results suggest that extraterrestrial life is extremely rare. Isn’t science wonderful?!” When the laughter subsided, he looked toward them, standing off to one side. “This is their day, Doctors Lang and Dayan, please tell us what you have found.”

  Joel raised the microphone for Kristi and it promptly emitted a deafening squeal. He fiddled with the controls, and a second try brought it quietly within range. “That’s why a skilled instrumentalist is so essential for every astronomy team,” she began, setting a glass of water atop the lectern. He laughed with the reporters but looked nervous, so she gave him a broad smile and faced the media. The New York Times and Science correspondents had been tipped off, and were sitting on the edges of their seats. They get it, she thought. She savored the moment, gloriously happy, for herself and for Greg. She almost felt his presence in the room. “Welcome,” she said. “I’m pleased that so many of you are here. We want to gratefully acknowledge our co-author, Ms. Ana Vassileva, who couldn’t be here today. She is space-walking at a geosynchronous altitude right now. Ana manages the health and safety of our instruments, and has gathered some of the data for our work. We’re going to take fifteen minutes to summarize our discoveries, and then we’ll be happy to answer questions.” The corkscrew appeared on the holoscreen beside her.