by Jon Steele
The inspector smiled.
“In police work, Dr. Mates, we never say ‘so fucking what?’ to the facts.”
“No disrespect, gentlemen, but the fact is you keep missing the point. This comet has fuck-all to do with Giacobini-Zinner, or the Draconids.”
“Are you quite sure?” the inspector said.
Dr. Mates pulled at his hair.
“Look, try and keep up with me on this. There are four thousand, one hundred, eighty-five known comets on record. Some of them are short-period comets, some are long-period; I’m talking about their orbits. All those have been recorded through history and are predictable. Giacobini-Zinner is one of those, so is Halley’s Comet. Then there are single apparition comets, such as Caesar’s Comet in 44 BC or Hale-Bopp in 1995. All recorded comets, whether predicted or single apparitions, were visible for days, weeks, months even. Hale-Bopp was visible to the naked eye for eighteen months. And all those comets appeared in graduating stages of luminance to a peak magnitude, then faded away.”
“Again, your point?” the inspector said.
“The data being analyzed by Blue Brain says this never-before-known comet will suddenly appear for sixty seconds at a magnitude of negative seven-point-five. That makes it one of the brightest comets ever, one of the brightest things in the entire night sky, from nowhere? I’m telling you, it’s impossible.”
“But if I understand you correctly, unknown comets do appear now and again. Single apparitions, as you say.”
“Appear, yes; predicting it will appear, absolutely not. No one can predict a single apparition comet. We learn about them as they are observed, not before. You want facts, I’ll give you one: Astronomy is science. We don’t pull bunnies from hats.”
The policeman paused. He and the judge looked at each other to further consider the evidence. The judge spoke with his pipe clenched between his teeth.
“So what you’re confirming to us is that what we are about to see is a comet, possibly emanating in the constellation Draco.”
Dr. Mates couldn’t believe what he was hearing. If his jaw stretched open any farther, it would have fallen from his face.
“Excuse me?”
The judge shrugged. “I said, you are telling us that we will be viewing—”
The astrophysicist was fit to burst.
“I’m not telling you that! No way am I telling you that!”
The inspector sighed with frustration. “Oh goodness gracious, Dr. Mates, what are you telling us, then?”
Harper wanted to laugh. They were beating up on Leo the Astrophysicist pretty good. It was taking effect. Dr. Mates was rattled.
“Look! Someone is predicting a never-before-seen celestial event, unlike anything that has ever happened in recorded history! Someone has discovered something that looks like a comet but is something completely . . .”
The policeman leaned toward Dr. Mates, awaiting the completion of his thought. When it wasn’t forthcoming, the inspector leaned even farther. “You were saying, Dr. Mates?”
“. . . different.”
Just then, light flickered in Harper’s eyes and shadows appeared on the floor of the roof. Instinctively he matched the shadows to the men. All good. He raised his eyes to the men’s faces. All of them looking to the sky, all their faces aglow—except for Dr. Mates with his binoculars pressed to his eyes. His face was in shadow, but the front lenses of his binoculars looked like warning lights from the far beyond. Harper looked up.
“Blimey.”
A great ball of silver light hovered and sparkled in the southeast quadrant of the sky, then a long shimmering tail took shape, curving across the night and stretching into the northwest, as if some lesser god had slashed open the firmament so the wondrous thing might be revealed. Harper mumbled to himself, “Something completely different. No shit.”
Watching it, Harper realized Paris had fallen quiet and still. Must have been the same all over a big chunk of Europe. Millions of people stopping cars and trams, rushing to windows and opening doors, all eyes turning to the strange light in the sky. Speechless, drifting through a wrinkle in time where one moment coupled to the next without a sense of passage. Then came a voice. Harper was relieved to realize it was only one of the inspector’s computer geeks and not one from on high.
“The comet should fade from vision in five, four, three, two, one . . . now.”
And so it did.
Dr. Mates read the data now displayed on the monitors.
“Incredible,” he said.
The inspector adopted his I’m-very-sure-I-have-no-idea tone. “Is there something of interest, Dr. Mates?”
“Well, yes. I’m not sure how he did it, he only had one minute. Your hacker tracked the comet on a line beginning at Alpha UMi—that’s Polaris—to Cassiopeia. He’s calculated forty degrees, or 31.28 parsecs, exactly. That’s a distance of over a hundred light-years.”
“Meaning what?”
“In and of itself, nothing. In astronomy, a hundred light-years is across the street. But it’s exactly as he predicted it. And look at this: He’s running a phenomenal number of triangulations from various points around the Earth, tens of thousands of them.”
“Again, Dr. Mates, I’m only a Swiss policeman,” Inspector Gobet said.
“He’s plotting the exact distance from all these positions on Earth to the comet’s transit.”
“To what end, would you say, given your expertise?” the judge said.
The doctor studied the monitors a minute. “It looks like he’s using Blue Brain to configure a 3-D model of planet Earth’s exact position in the galaxy, based on the Cartesian coordinate system.”
The last three words sent Harper ripping back through time. He saw the one-eyed priest, Astruc, at a side altar of l’Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Entombed in the nearby wall was René Descartes. The great headless man who devised the Cartesian coordinate system. Harper blinked, called from the shadows.
“Why the fuck would he do that?”
Dr. Mates turned to the voice. “Excuse me?”
“The Cartesian coordinate system. Why?”
“Who’s asking?”
Harper stepped into the glow of the monitors. “Me.”
Maybe it was the tone in Harper’s voice, maybe it was connecting the voice to a physical presence that looked as if it had stepped from the hard end of a battlefield. Combined with Harper’s Brit accent, Dr. Mates was thrown off balance.
“Who . . . who are you?”
Harper nodded toward the inspector and the judge. “I’m with them.”
“The police?”
“That’s right, and answer the question.”
Dr. Mates looked nervously at Inspector Gobet. “If you don’t mind my asking,” Mates said, “what sort of crime are these hackers involved in?”
The inspector cleared his throat. “At present, let’s just say it would be best if we asked the questions and you did the answering.”
The line was perfectly placed for maximum effect. The doctor surrendered. He looked at Harper.
“What was your question again?”
“What does the mathematical formula of a dead man from the seventeenth century have to do with building a 3-D model of planet Earth?”
The doctor swallowed, cleared his throat.
“It’s how you build an algorithm that supports a digitized structure in three dimensions. All modern computer animation, 2-D or 3-D, is based on Descartes’s mathematical formulae.”
Harper thought about it. Made sense, maybe.
“You telling me he’s trying to make a globe, or a map?”
“Yes. But if he is, he’s wasting his time.”
“Sorry?”
“There’s nothing new in creating a 3-D image of Earth or the universe as we know it. We do this sort of imaging all the time. I
n fact, the whole process has gone Hollywood. James Cameron did it in Avatar.”
“Who?”
“The American movie director. He created an entire planet, Pandora, using the Cartesian coordinate system. I was a consultant on the film, actually.”
Harper looked at the inspector. The inspector’s gaze read, By all means, Mr. Harper, do make yourself useful and give him a nudge. Harper walked straight toward Dr. Mates.
“Congrats on your brilliant career, Doc, but let me tell you what I think. The one who hacked into Blue Brain, the one running these calculations, kills people. So I doubt he’s trying to make it big in Hollywood. What do you think?”
Dr. Mates got a whiff of the foul stink from Harper’s filthy clothes. Harper checked the man’s eyes, saw the most primitive part of the man’s brain kick in. Reptilian brain it was. Millions of years old on the evolutionary chain, and just now it recognized the smell of death and was screaming “Run away!” back up the chain. Dr. Mates reversed slowly, bumped into the table. He surrendered again.
“All I can tell you is he’s building an incredibly complex algorithm to figure Earth’s exact position in the galaxy.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sure you do, you’re from bloody Oxford, three PhD’s, got your own TV show on the bloody Beeb. Makes you a right genius.”
Harper saw something go boing in the man’s eyes.
“What?”
“It’s a clock. He’s using Descartes’s formulae to make a clock.”
“A clock?”
“It has to be. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, until you realize space and time are the same thing. Measuring the expansion of the universe and telling the time are both done by triangulating and calculating the relative distance between three or more separate points. A map and a clock serve the same purpose. They tell you where you are in the universe at any particular moment.”
“Keep talking, Doc.”
“Well . . . it’s like the grandfather clock in the hallway of my house is only the triangulation of a big hand, little hand, and the seconds pendulum in relation to the clock face. That’s what he’s doing, it must be. All these reference points on the planet, those are the seconds. The minutes were the comet’s path. Presto, it’s a clock.”
Harper flashed that before the cathedral job, he’d been in stasis since 1917. He took a second to ask himself how these creatures of free will had discovered time and space were the same thing in less than a hundred years. He blinked, snapped himself to nowtimes.
“What about the little hand, Doc?”
“What?”
“The hand marking the hour, where is it?”
“I don’t know, but it must be somewhere on the Earth. A horizon of some kind, from wherever he’s watching the sky.”
Harper flashed the sextant from the cavern.
“Could he be using the sea?”
“No, he’s measuring to the quintillionth of seconds, attoseconds. That’s the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms. I mean, an attosecond is to a second what a second is to nearly thirty-two billion years. That’s why he’s using Blue Brain to make the calculations. No, it can’t be the sea. He needs a perfectly still horizon, not even a flat geographical plain would work. He needs an artificial horizon, probably a laser. Gads, that’s it! He’s feeding coordinates into Blue Brain, and Blue Brain is running with it! Blue Brain can see it! I’m telling you, it’s one great bugger of a clock! Gads, this is the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant!”
Harper looked at Inspector Gobet and the judge, reading that the two of them already knew the score. They were testing Dr. Mates, seeing if an ordinary man could imagine it.
“So, Doc,” Harper said.
“Yes?”
“What time is it?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said it’s a clock. What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
Dr. Mates pulled at his hair, trying to reattach his own brain back to Earth.
“Look, imagine the grandfather clock again. Seconds, minutes, hours running around a clock face. Three independent elements circling above a common plane that mean absolutely nothing in and of themselves without a common zero point that makes it possible to tell the time.”
“Which is what?”
“Both hands straight up. Twelve o’clock high.”
“So what’s their twelve o’clock high? The hackers, I mean.”
“A star, most probably.”
“Which star?”
“If he’s doing it by the naked eye, then it could be any one of six thousand stars. If he’s using a radio telescope, then it could be . . . any one of three billion . . . times a hundred billion. It’s just . . . impossible.”
The man’s voice fizzled away to a place of disbelief. That’s it, Harper thought, Leo the Astrophysicist has reached the outer limit of his imagination. Harper glanced back over his shoulder, saw the inspector chatting discreetly with the judge. Harper knew what was coming. He turned to Dr. Mates, spoke softly, and with a touch of kindness.
“That’s a lot of stars, Doc.”
Dr. Mates responded to the tone, laughed a little.
“Tell me about it. I just wish I knew how he was doing it. What tool he was using to make his initial calculations.”
“What do you mean?”
“It can’t be one of the radio telescopes or observation telescopes, I’d know about it. I know what any one of those is doing any day of the week.”
Harper looked into the sky, too. There were only a handful of stars visible over Paris now.
“He’s using a sextant.”
Dr. Mate’s eyes went from disbelief to childlike joy.
“Holy fucking . . . amazing . . . of course. But how do you know?”
“I’ve seen it.”
The man was giddy. “No way, you’ve seen it, really?”
“Yes.”
“Well . . . what kind of sextant is it?”
“An old one.”
“How old?”
“Not sure, really. Only got a glimpse of it. Five thousand years; older, maybe. However bloody old it is, it was made to be used tonight.”
Dr. Mates appeared dazed as the truth dropped into his head.
“My God, someone knew this would happen tonight. Someone thousands and thousands of years ago knew this would happen. That’s . . . that’s . . .” The doctor was finding it increasingly difficult to express himself.
“Impossible?” Harper said.
“Well, it is. Isn’t it?”
Harper shrugged. A few hours ago, he was in a cavern deep beneath Paris, talking to a dead man who kept saying the same bloody word: impossible, impossible. Now, on a rooftop above the Left Bank, he was hearing the same word. Not much difference between the living and the dead when exposed to a world they were never meant to be aware of, Harper thought.
“I tell you what’s impossible, Doc: a comet appearing out of thin air and hovering in the sky at a magnitude of negative seven-point-five as part of an intergalactic alarm clock.”
Dr. Mates’s mind was ready to explode and he laughed, slipping from his very Oxford tones into a native northerner’s twang.
“Fookin’ ’ell, I’m a bleedin’ scientist, you know? But I tell you, I feel like I’ve been let in on some wonderful cosmic secret tonight. It changes . . .”
Harper gave the man a second.
“Changes what, Doc?”
Dr. Mates looked at Harper.
“Everything.”
Harper looked down, saw a formidable shadow moving over the roof. The cop in the cashmere coat was coming their way. Harper smiled at Dr. Mates.
“Glad you enjoyed it, Doc. Too bad
you won’t remember it.”
“Why not?”
Inspector Gobet stepped quickly between them and locked on to the man’s eyes.
“Doctor, I’m afraid you must excuse Mr. Harper. He’s had a rather distressing evening, as you can see. Hit by a tour bus on the Champs-Elysées this very evening. Sort of thing that happens when one doesn’t bother to look both ways.”
“An accident?”
“Yes, most upsetting to even hear about it, I agree,” the inspector said, pointing to the stairs. “Shall we go down to the library, Doctor? I think a cup of tea would help calm the excitement of the evening.”
“Tea?”
“Quite. I have some rather soothing herbal blends. Never leave home without them. I think you’ll find one in particular most relaxing. Mixed with a bit of Japanese hand-rolled Sencha from a small plantation I know very well. Near Wazuka in the Kyoto Prefecture. Do you know it?”
“Japan?”
“Indeed. Lovely part of the world, I think. This way if you please, Dr. Mates.”
Mutt and Jeff moved in on either side of Leo the Astrophysicist, practically lifting him off his feet and edging him to the door. He tried to protest.
“But . . . but there’s so much to know yet! The hacker’s not finished with building his clock!”
The inspector laughed politely.
“Yes, well, you know how it is with time, it goes on and on. Besides, I’d be very interested in hearing that theory of yours again.”
“My theory?”
“Yes, regarding this evening’s event being no more than a rogue piece of Giacobini-Zinner that burned up upon entry into Earth’s atmosphere, thereby accounting for this evening’s rather spectacular celestial vision.”
“But I never said that.”
“No? Why, I could swear you did. Well, you know how it is with policemen. Always needing to hear things again and again to get the facts through the thickest of skulls. I’m sure we can sort it all out with a nice cup of tea. This way, if you please.”
Harper watched them disappear down the stairs. A couple cuppas from now, the man would be singing the inspector’s tune and believing every word of it. So much so that Harper imagined tomorrow evening’s lecture at l’Académie des sciences, where Dr. Mates would amend his prepared remarks regarding the oceans of planet Earth being formed by a bombardment of frozen water comets 4.5 billion years ago, to include his considered opinion on the previous night’s celestial event (which he personally viewed whilst strolling along the Left Bank), and thereby set the record straight for mankind. “Ab uno disce omnes,” Harper mumbled.