Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Tillie was a fair woman of thirty-five or a little more. She carried a paper bag. “A robe,” she said. “He mentioned you’d be tired and have nothing at all to put on.” She wrinkled her nose. “You want those things in the laundry, or trash can?”

  “Laundry,” Jean said indignantly, and they left together.

  “She’ll do,” Zach said.

  “What’s happening here?”

  “I don’t know if they realize you got out of Oregon yet, but they’ll know by tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting scheduled for nine in the morning. I wasn’t sure what we’d be announcing to them. Guess I didn’t really believe it would be this. Laurence Tilton from the President’s staff is coming over, and he’s lined up half a dozen independent referees. Some of them are on the President’s science advisory staff, and I’m not sure yet who the others are. One shuttle is on the ground, maintenance problem. This morning Luther ordered the other shuttle to return in forty-eight hours, bringing Sid, Brett, more than half our people back home for what he calls an extraordinary meeting. You bet it’s extraordinary. They won’t go back, if he has his way. That’s the opening gambit, and we’ve got to move fast. And it doesn’t help matters a damn bit that the Russians are already shuffling their people around.”

  “And the President? Where’s he in all this? Doesn’t he know the next step is a military takeover?”

  “He’s thistledown in the wind, Cluny. No more than that. If we blow hard enough with our message, he’ll go with us. If not, he’ll count on being a figurehead.”

  Throughout the evening, into the night, people arrived, consulted, left again. Jean huddled with computer programmers for hours, telling them exactly what she needed, how to program the material. Her clothes arrived sometime during that afternoon and Cluny was shocked when he saw her in a tailored pants suit with a frilly blouse in a soft melon color. He had not seen her dressed up since they were children. She looked like a little girl playing grownup.

  That evening Murray arrived and drew Cluny out into the hallway. “God, that was good work, kid!” he said fervently. “I knew you’d deliver!” He slapped Cluny on the shoulder, and started to return to the room. “Oh, that guy Davies said was on your tail that night? Heard he had an accident; hit by a truck or something. He’s the only one with direct evidence; anything else is hearsay, worth absolutely nothing. Thought you should know.” Quickly he reentered the room, leaving Cluny standing in the hallway.

  “Wait!” Cluny yelled, but the door was already closed. He stared at it. It had to have been an accident, he thought, too hard, too clearly, trying to deny the implications behind Murray’s words, evident in the tone of voice, so casual and offhand, almost as if it had been an afterthought. He felt very cold suddenly. He went back inside; Murray was talking to three men who would try to determine the orbits for the cylinders. Murray looked up, returned Cluny’s gaze steadily for a moment, then rejoined the discussion, turning his back altogether on Cluny.

  Later Cluny found himself thinking: spies, counterspies, agents, double agents, investigators, private investigators, blackmail, threats. . . . There was a lump of concrete in his stomach and his skin was clammy. Davies would simply nod, accept this as one of the infinite possibilities of this particular game. He caught a flash of light on Zach’s white hair. Zach would have blinked, then opened his eyes to a new situation, prepared to go on from there. Jean was looking at Zach, listening intently. He wanted to go over to her, yank her from her chair and make her listen. This is how it is, baby! Your father played this game and so did mine. We all play the game. You’re all the way in or all the way out.

  She would learn, he knew. From now on she was in, all the way in. They’d see to that. She might not like the rules, or the way they kept score, but she would play her part. They all played their parts.

  It was after two in the morning when everyone but Zach had left for the night. “I’ll take one of the beds in your room, if you don’t mind,” he said to Cluny. He looked ready to collapse and when he left the living room he stumbled against a chair and regarded it blankly before continuing.

  “I’m going to bed too,” Jean said. “What a day!”

  “Wait a minute.” Cluny leaned forward. “When did you find time to discover so much about the message? You said it would take months, years even, and yet you seem to know everything about it. How?”

  She looked at him with faint crinkle lines at her eyes, as if she was repressing a deep smile. “I had time,” she said. “My father told me once about a thinking place, a place where you can think a lifetime’s worth of thoughts in a few minutes, if you learn how to do it. I believed him, but I couldn’t do it. Then Serena, one of my Indian friends, the wisest woman I’ve ever met, taught me how to use it, as much as she could anyway. I had plenty of time on the desert.”

  “You could visualize the message enough to keep on working with it?”

  “There was a lot of time.” She stood up and stretched. “Good night, Cluny.”

  He watched her go down the hall, turn at her room and vanish inside, and he could almost taste his frustration. She had told him nothing, in such a way that he had not been able to question it, and now it was too late.

  Jean undressed slowly, too tired to make any strenuous effort, not even the effort to hurry to get into bed. Zach had said they would tape everything the following day, they would let a voice-stress analyst determine if the speakers were truthful, meaning her, and that would be reported along with the conclusions reached at the all-day conference. He had said it with a particular intensity, watching her for a reaction. And she had smiled at him. “I won’t lie about anything at all,” she had said.

  She brushed her teeth and then crawled into bed with its smooth sheets and plump down pillow, luxuries she had not known for a long time. She would not lie, she thought, but neither would she tell the entire truth. She imagined herself telling them about talking with coyote in the light of the moon and, smiling, she fell asleep.

  There were eleven men and women in the room, seated at a conference table piled with folders, graphs, photographs, note pads. There was a coffeepot and plastic cups. Jean was at the end of the table, speaking. To her right was Zach Greene, who never took his eyes off her. Cluny was there, as was Murray, and Dr. Schmidt. There was a woman computer scientist from MIT and two other NASA officials, and a middle-aged man she had not been introduced to, from the President’s staff, a woman exobiologist from the National Sciences Board, and another woman from the Communications Center at Hastings-on-Hudson.

  Jean had been very nervous before the meeting had started, but by the time the introductions were over, her computer screen placed where all could see, her terminal before her, and with Dr. Schmidt’s beaming approval warming her, she had lost her unease and now spoke quietly of the work she had done.

  “At first I tried to find duplications, and there are none. Although many lines appear similar, no two curves are exactly alike, no two groupings of the lines are alike. I tried arranging them according to size, and again, it led nowhere.” The pictures of her attempts were shown as she spoke. A lumpy circle appeared. “No circles . . .”

  She took them step by step through her work until she reached the point where she had removed the four “stems,” and now ellipses appeared. “I had to go look up the definition and mathematical formula for ellipses,” she said, smiling slightly, “but as you see, the remaining lines did form four perfect ellipses. I concluded they could be orbits, and that could be part of the message.”

  No one moved as she spoke and the computer screen flicked from one picture to the next. The original picture of the scroll appeared, with the neatly spaced groups of curved lines. It changed to a grid, nine boxes each way.

  “I extracted all the groups that made up one ellipse,” Jean said. “There were twenty-one of them. The next ellipse was made up of eighteen groups, and the next two had twenty-one each. It seemed significant to me that only one ellipse used eighteen, and I studied that configur
ation for a long time, pondering the possibilities. It is not the smallest of the ellipses, as I assumed at first, but rather the largest. I assumed from the beginning,” she said, looking at them all, “that nothing was random about the message, nothing was accidental. Eighteen had to have importance if that assumption was correct. But there was no pattern that I could identify. Next I separated the grid into strips and reshuffled them, and finally I came up with this new configuration.”

  There was a gasp from someone at the far end of the table when the next picture appeared. It looked like a stylized plane, or a rocket ship, or possibly a sting ray. It was made up of eighteen blacked-out spaces on the grid of eighty-one squares.

  “This is the message we found,” Jean said, showing it again. “By dividing it into strips, three of them two squares wide, the full length down, and one three squares wide, I had four strips. If we rearrange them so that the widest strip is first, we get the pattern.” On the screen the strips were separated slightly, a number over each one. The sequence was three, four, one, two. Three and four began to move left, off the screen, the others moved to the left and three and four reappeared following number two; the ship, or fish, appeared again.

  When she finished, the questions started. One of the NASA men led off. She could remember hardly any of their names, she realized with embarrassment.

  “Why did you decide the messages are signaling devices? I don’t think you’ve touched on that at sufficient length.”

  “Here is the entire message starting with number one,” Jean said. She pointed to one of the boxes. “That is the original group, two sides and a stem. It suggests an apple to me. And here”— she pointed to the next-lower row, the box on a diagonal with first one—“is the next sequence. Two lines very much like the first two, but without the stem now, and these two appear to be falling away from each other. And finally, here in the next-lower diagonal boxes, each line has formed a new relationship with different lines. The very fact that they are on the diagonal, going downward, suggests falling apart.” She pointed to another section. “The same process,” she said. “First the three lines, two sides and the stem, and then the same falling away in the next boxes diagonally down from it.” She showed the other two sets of curves with the same sequences. “Again, it could not be coincidence, not a random ordering of the curves. So, if it is for a purpose, this particular arrangement, how could that purpose be served? Only by removing one of the parts? I thought so anyway. And I began to think about why the other two pieces would fall apart as they seem to do. It suggests a force binding the three, and by taking one out, that force is disrupted, turned off. But such a force would not be needed to keep the cylinders in place. It had to serve another purpose, and I thought possibly it could be a signal. When the relay is turned off, disrupted, a signal is sent announcing it. I could be completely wrong about that part of it,” she added simply.

  “You believe that there are three other messages, and you know where they are?” The presidential aide was studying her with narrowed eyes, as if judging her for market.

  “If the ovals represent orbits and the farthest orbit corresponds to the finished pattern, the ship, then the one we found would be number two. There should be one closer to Earth, and two farther out. If we know the orbit of the number two cylinder, we should be able to compute approximately how far it is from the others, and so on. I can’t do it, but I can see how it can be done.”

  “We’ve done it.” Zach said then. “We’ll get into that in a couple of minutes. Any more questions?”

  “Yes.” It was the woman from the National Sciences Board. Exobiologist, Jean remembered, Hazel something. Her hair was carrot red, her skin as white as milk.

  “Ms. Brighton, everything you have explained seems very childish, primitive even, like a child’s prank. This suggests a Rorschach test to me, where you’ve let your imagination play games with you. Any extraterrestrial race that can travel interstellar distances surely is not as primitive in communications as you would have us believe.”

  “Hell!” Marian Cassel, from Hastings-on-Hudson, said in disgust. “Effective communications demand a feedback system. We have almost fifty percent redundancy in our languages just to guard against missing the point the first time around. If you’re sending a message without knowing who’s going’ to get it, you’ve got no feedback. You use tricks to make it clear what you mean, because you can’t rephrase and repeat if there’s any misunderstanding the first time. You use universals, like gravity, to suggest falling down. You use shapes, like fish, or birds, or ships, to suggest a movement through a particular medium. You use numbers in a one to one relationship. One for me, one for you, one for me, one for you. Eighteen! My God, don’t any of you see what that means? It’s when they are going to move through their medium and arrive here! It’s eighteen orbits of our Earth around our Sun! It’s so basic it makes me sick to think of looking for E equals MC squared. There’s no language because how the hell did they know which one of the various language groups would find it? No pretty picture of the sun and its planets with an X marking Earth? What the hell for? We know where we are, and so do they, and if it’s important for us to know where they are, they’ll tell us when they get here. No pretty man and woman with long clean limbs and flowing hair? So? Ask an Eskimo if that’s his idea of homo sap. Ask a Bantu. Ask a Japanese woman. We sent those Mickey Mouse messages of ours, and you expect them to be the standard? What we have here is a straightforward message that tells us to expect company. I say let’s get on with finding the other three, and let’s see if we can derive any more from the one we have, and let’s announce to the world that we’d better wash up because guess who’s coming to dinner.”

  She sat back in her chair, glaring at the red-haired woman, who turned away with a look of disdain. Jean could have hugged Marian Cassel. She caught Cluny’s look and smiled slightly as he put one hand before his mouth and coughed, ducking his head to hide his own grin.

  Shortly before noon the first meeting ended. Zach steered Jean and Cluny to a smaller room that reminded Jean of a dentist’s waiting room, with the right assortment of magazines, the same soft lighting, the standard vinyl chairs.

  “For the rest of the day,” Zach said, “it’s going to be pretty technical. Plans for finding the other three cylinders, stuff like that. You can stay, or go back to the apartment.”

  “Column A or Column B,” Jean murmured.

  “Exactly. We’ve got to keep you under wraps for a while yet.”

  “For my own good,” Jean said gravely.

  “You said it. Which would you prefer?”

  “The apartment. Is it permitted that I make some requests?”

  “For what?”

  “Books, paper, a typewriter.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  She looked at Cluny. “You’ll be tied up, I guess. See you later.” Then she added, “Remember what we talked about?”

  He nodded. “Zach knows. He doesn’t want it kept a secret either. We’ll do what we can.”

  Tilton had gone directly to the White House following the morning conference; and until they heard something, they would go on as if they expected full cooperation. They would try to plot the orbits, locate the probable spots for the cylinders, start people working on the announcement, make contingency plans for including the Russians. . . . Dr. Schmidt was organizing a staff of experts to see if they could wring anything more out of the message they already had. He had accepted Jean’s findings without question, and when Zach had demanded to know how he could be so certain, he had shrugged. “She did the impossible before under Arkins. So she did it again. Tomorrow she may well do it once more.”

  Although the meetings had taken place in the space agency building, and the work was progressing there, it was all done without Luther Krohmeier’s knowledge or consent, and when the phone call from the White House came finally at nine that night, he was at home, Zach hung up carefully, and turned to Cluny and Murray with a look of incre
dulity on his face.

  “We’ve done it!” he whispered.

  CHAPTER

  20

  A TINY spacecraft edged up to an orbiting mass of space junk and matched speeds with the largest clump of meteorites; a suited figure floated away, tethered to the ship by a thread that looked like fine silk. The man on the line was like a lure being drawn through water; he examined the rocks, waved to his companion inside the craft, and slowly floated back to it. The small ship moved on.

  Cluny watched the scene, gnawing his lip, until the spacecraft moved out of sight. One of the technicians made an adjustment on a control panel and the craft appeared again, started its maneuver to close in on another, similar clump of floating rocks. Cluny left the room; no one looked up.

  “It’ll be there,“ Alex said, falling into place by his side. “We’ll find it.”

  “It’s been ten months.”

  “We’ll find it,” Alex repeated. “No one who has examined the message doubts any longer. And many good people have examined it.”

  “Ten fucking months!”

  Alex laughed and put his arm about Cluny’s shoulders. “You’re disappointed that you must leave before it is located. You wanted to be the one.”

  Cluny grinned at him, not denying it. “A needle in a haystack would be easier, wouldn’t it?”

  “Much easier.”

  “Thank God for Klyuchevsky,” Cluny said fervently.

  The Russian laughed. “Or Providence, or Chance, or Fate.”

  Klyuchevsky had seen it also. Among his belongings there had been a journal, and on one of its pages had been a solitary drawing of a crude formation, much like an apple with a stem. Klyuchevsky had not returned to Earth, but had been killed when a piece of structural steel had got out of control, had floated like a dream missile in slow motion through space to pierce his craft as it had approached the docking area.