Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Chandliss refused to complete the thought. The relentless motion of the earth had swept the source of the signal away from the focus of his telescope, but that same motion would return it tomorrow. When it arrived, he would be ready to listen again.

  For thirty years Allen Chandliss had listened to the song of the heavens. Three distinguished years at Agassiz, then on to Kitt Peak for work on detecting interstellar molecules. His eight years there were crowned by the perfection of the first technique for directly measuring the distance to the cool hydrogen clouds known as the H-l regions.

  Just two years later, his relative fame, his promising future, and his very position were stripped from him. He was not alone in that. Radio astronomy, like all other endeavors deemed nonessential, disappeared as a means of gainful employment. Those who had practiced it left the observatories and universities, and all over the world the great dishes came to an indefinite rest in the neutral position, as if gripped by a paralytic disease.

  Green Bank, Mr. Wilson, Hat Creek, and the other North American instruments were shut down by government fiat, their funding cut off, their utilities shut off. The disease spread: Efflesburg, Serpukov, even Jodrell Bank. The end came seemingly without warning, but the warning had been there. The radio astronomers, their ears to the heavens, had simply not heard it until it was too late.

  At least in America, the scientists’ stock had begun to fall the moment the fission blanket became a reality. For President Martin Novak, the fission blanket symbolized the arrogance of a meddling minority who held themselves above the “plain folks.” His excoriation of them began with “traitor” and then turned unfriendly. Novak laid the nation’s loss of manhood and the calamities still to come at the scientists’ feet. And he painted with a broad brush, holding biologists and astronomers as culpable as physicists.

  Novak’s campaign was only the most extreme example of a wider phenomenon. The government of every nuclear nation was livid, with a series of “people’s assassinations” of publicly identified Project Hope scientists one result. But the citizens of those same nations were, for the most part, delighted. For a brief time, a refreshing if unwarranted wave of global optimism blunted Novak’s attacks.

  But Novak returned to his theme in the wake of the Saudi embargo. “Where are our benefactors now? Why can they only take and not give? Why will they not help us when their help is truly needed?” he asked, and many wondered. A scandal involving nearly $20 billion in Fund For Energy grants seemed to prove his point.

  When the time came to commit troops to the Middle East, Novak could point to the failure of the scientists and be confident the masses would say he was “only doin’ what the white-coats made him.”

  But by that time, Chandliss had already arranged to resume his former profession.

  Chandliss was far from the first to build his own radio telescope. American Grote Reber had assembled the prototype in his backyard in the 1930’s, and with it produced the first radio map of the sky. By the 1950’s the radio telescope was a common project in amateur electronics books, and in the 1980’s many a ham radio operator added a sky antenna to his rig as part of Delta Vee’s SETI program.

  The dish tucked between two lodgepole pines in the Idaho hills was in many ways a greater marvel than any of its predecessors. The dish itself was unremarkable; thousands like it had dotted the human landscape in the years before the collapse.

  But it stood in its little clearing, pointing out through a small opening in the forest canopy, due to the physical labor of a man who, before beginning it, had never had the need to labor. It had escaped detection for seventeen years despite the wanderings of thousands of landless. It had been put into operation by a man who had started out notably ignorant of the arcane art of electron-pushing. And it was, potentially, the arbiter of Chandliss’s life or death.

  Though a fall while pruning one of the trees during construction had lamed him, the real risk was what the antenna represented. He faced both official and informal death penalties: from the authorities for diverting precious metals and energy resources to the specious cause of astronomy, and from the common people, for wasn’t it true that the scientists were to blame for the current state of the world? Be it so or not, that was what was said.

  The observatory was an odd jumble of seemingly unrelated parts, gathered with ruthless zeal during the period between President Novak’s first Energy Edict and the arrival of the National Guard to enforce it. The dish had once stood behind a suburban house pulling in movie reruns and endless athletic contests from a direct-broadcast television satellite. The TEF had served as an audio engineering testbed; the chart recorder, as a hospital labor monitor.

  Only the receiver was doing the job for which it had been originally intended. It was also the only item he had been able to save from the first truckload of supplies he had brought into the Salmon National Forest. The rest, including the truck and the parts of the larger, steerable earth station, had been taken by the survivalists.

  But sometimes it all worked, and when it did, the TEF would patiently record the march of the numbers. For particularly interesting sources he would allow the precious paper to curl through the recorder, displaying a jumbled landscape of peaks and valleys. Little by little, the sky rolled over Chandliss’s valley, and he listened as it did.

  Chandliss labored under no pretensions. He knew that beside virtually any of the equipment he had once commanded, his rig was a laughable toy. The superb hundred-metre dish at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn had been cleverly designed to deform from one perfect curve to another as gravity tugged at its moving mass. The finely finished Kitt Peak dish had been sensitive enough to hear an electron drop an energy level in a hydrogen atom fifty light-years away.

  The masterpiece had been the blandly named Very Large Array, twenty-five computer-driven dishes spread across a vast expanse of New Mexico sand. There had been so little time to use it…

  Regrettably, the tasks that were left to Chandliss and his creation were vanishingly few. Radio astronomy had passed out of the backyard stage a half century ago. Unlike its optical cousin, the only significant work left demanded the newest technology—fully steerable dishes, powerful computers, atomic clocks. As early as the 1960’s once-great instruments had begun to be retired, the jobs for which they had been built completed and the new tasks beyond their capabilities. At times Chandliss identified with those instruments—his time past, his purpose gone.

  There was only one task that, due to official opprobium and skepticism, had never been satisfactorily completed—scanning the sky for evidence of intelligent life. Observatory time was too precious to squander on what most considered either fruitless or irrelevant. There were exceptions, of course—Frank Drake’s imaginative “Ozma,” Bowyer’s “Serendip,” Paul Horowitz’s hopeful “Suitcase SETI,” and any number of others during that same crazy-wishful time. Chandliss could have taken up that gauntlet, but he was a doubter; he let it lie.

  Instead, he had spent the years duplicating work that had been done before, correcting the position of a source here, noting a small change in the output of one there, toying with theoretical models he could not hope to confirm, but accomplishing nothing of substance.

  It was that realization, more than the seventeen years of loneliness, which had begun to disassemble the great man Chandliss had once been.

  His oft-recalcitrant instruments cooperating, Chandliss was ready the next day. He marked the passage of the calibration source, an angry buzz in his earphones. Precious chart paper flashed under the pen at the highest possible speed; the disk drive whirred as Monitor stored blocks of data. Chandliss, shifting his weight impatiently from one foot to the other, at last heard what he had doubted he would hear. The tone was clear and nearly noise-free, modulating rapidly between two frequencies in an arrhythmic warble. All too quickly it faded, replaced by the familiar all-frequency static that Chandliss usually found soothing.

  Stunned, Chandliss slowly removed the headset a
nd shakily made his way to a chair. His fingers prowled absently through his beard as he tried to remember, tried to understand.

  Once before had he heard such a sound. When the newly refurbished thousand-foot telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was dedicated in 1974, Drake and Sagan had taken that opportunity to send one of the few deliberate messages ever intended for non-human listeners—a 169-second cosmic declaration, a coded signal thrown with the power of a half million watts toward the great star cluster Messier 13 in the constellation Hercules.

  Despite his skepticism on the question of life elsewhere, like many others in the crowd of two hundred Chandliss had had tears in his eyes as the message ended, overawed at the thought that in twenty-five thousand years, when all humankind’s works might be dust, the message would still be speeding through space, declaring more than anything that beings who thought and dreamed and loved life once walked the surface of the third stone from the sun.

  But this emission—no! an inner voice insisted, call it a message!—had come from the stars.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  Radioman

  Being alone without being lonely was an art Chandliss knew well. His location had permitted it, his personality had encouraged it, and his occupation had demanded it. But never had he felt more powerfully alone than in the minutes that followed the end of the Message.

  All at once, Chandliss came to his feet, scooping up a handful of chestnuts from a container in the food chest as he headed for the door. Outside, he turned south, toward the Chairman’s conference room.

  The clearing was a ten-minute walk from his cabin, and Chandliss was panting when he settled on a fallen log to wait. Before long there was a rustling in the branches of the trees, a black flash on the trunk of one, and then the northern squirrel Chandliss called the Chairman joined him in the clearing. Chandliss tossed a nut near his feet, and the Chairman began a tentative approach.

  “Afternoon, Chairman,” Chandliss said. “Have a moment to discuss a problem?”

  The squirrel dashed forward to claim the offering.

  “It’s this new project, Chairman. I don’t think this new project really belongs in my area. Isn’t there someone else who can handle it?”

  The Chairman, having retreated to what he thought was a safe distance, chewed busily.

  “Ah—then I’m stuck with it, am I? But I‘ll still need help confirmation of the basic facts. But where in the world will I find a dish that hasn’t been stripped for salvage or abandoned to rust and rot?”

  The Chairman offered no suggestions.

  “Oh, Arecibo is still there, certainly, but the antenna trolley isn’t; we heard about that when you could still get radio from Boise. Fifty stories above the dish, all six hundred tons—when that hurricane hit, the trolley must have made quite a hole in the dish.”

  The Chairman concurred and moved to the next item on the agenda—begging. Chandliss deferred to his wishes.

  “Who can I trust? Who would trust me, for that matter? Perhaps overseas. Certainly not here. It’s as hard to find a scientist now in the States—quaint of me, yes, to use the old name—as hard to find one of us as it was to find someone who admitted they voted for Nixon. I must tell you about Nixon some time.”

  The Chairman took a seat at the other end of the log.

  “The members of the Order of the Dolphin would understand immediately; they were the ones that kept pushing SETI. Yes, I know, my jargon is as bad as when you talk about budgets and grants and say our college can’t afford new equipment. But Drake and Lilly are dead, and who knows where the rest of them are? It’s been a long time, and I was never close with that bunch, never close, never really believed.”

  Chandliss held the next offering between the tips of his fingers, and the Chairman hesitated, evaluating his options.

  “I could write letters, but they would take months to arrive, if they did at all—and I’d never know. Too many hands, too many unfriendly eyes.

  “You’re right, Chairman—the only sure way is to find a Radioman, see who I can reach. If they don’t take me for what I am first.”

  Placing hunger above fear, the Chairman scrambled onto Chandliss’s leg to claim the nut. He hesitated there a moment, then sprang to the ground, his nails digging painfully into the astronomer’s leg as he jumped. A few energetic bounds, and the Chairman was gone.

  “That’s the way, isn’t it?” Chandliss said sadly. “You take the risks you must to keep yourself whole.” He stood and brushed at the patched cloth of his trouser legs. “I wonder if perhaps England—with the North Sea and that coal—things might not have gone down so badly there.” Returning to the cabin, he began to prepare for the hike into Ketchum.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  Chandliss frowned and shifted the straps of his pack onto a different set of blisters. Before leaving the cabin, he had filled the pack with the currency of the times—energy in one form or another. Most of it was food, as much as he could spare and carry. Concealed by a fold of cloth in the pack was his insurance, a precious forty-watt section of his solar array.

  Federal money was still legal tender in the United North, but unless things had changed there was little that could be bought with it. Nevertheless, Chandliss had brought that, too—the little he had left. He had spent the bulk of it while collecting his supplies, when he realized its worthlessness, and before many others did. Ninety-odd Anthony dollars clinked occasionally in a pocket of the pack, and a now-damp collection of paper twenties filled the bottom of a trouser pocket.

  “Someone’s coming!” repeated the child, and another took up the cry. The first houses along the road were to either side of him now, and ahead he saw people stop and look his way.

  When he drew near enough to the first adult—a woman only a few years younger than himself, considering him from the middle of her front yard garden with a gaze devoid of warmth—Chandliss summoned up a cheeriness he did not feel and called a hello. The woman did not answer, nor did her expression change as she followed his progress into town. Chandliss felt her eyes in his back as a physical sensation, a crawling of the skin between his shoulder blades. It was the same with the other adults he passed; they stopped to watch him, but not with curiosity. It was as though knowing him to be a stranger, they knew everything of importance.

  And they knew he was a stranger, without a doubt. Chandliss berated himself for having failed to anticipate how much he would stand out. Probably the town’s population had been stable for so long that it acted more like a family than a community, a complex barter system reinforcing the normal small-town closeness. It made sense, but understanding made it less comfortable.

  The children had long since carried news of his arrival to the heart of the town, and Chandliss was not surprised when a tall man thirty years his junior stepped out into the street to intercept him. “Mornin’.” He squinted upward at the sun. “Or should I say afternoon? Hardly matters, I s’pose. Come far?”

  “Through the Sawtooth. Far enough.” Chandliss slipped the pack off his shoulders. “Allen Chandliss,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Tom Heincke,” said the villager, keeping his hands in his back pockets. “Have you come to trade, or are you just passing through?”

  “I’ve some business with your Radioman.”

  Heincke nodded. “I’ll take you to him.” It was more an order to follow than an offer to help, and Chandliss fell in beside him. He was led to the door of a small, one-story building sprouting a half-dozen antennae, all but one makeshift.

  “Radioman?”

  A short, wiry man appeared from the gloom at the back of the building. “Yeah, Tom.”

  “Fellow has need of you. I’ll be at the club when he’s done.” Radioman nodded. “Come on in.” He walked a few steps to a table, lit a pair of candles, then turned. “You done business with me before?” he asked, his voice no more friendly than the faces of those Chandliss had passed.

  “No.”

  “I
put a mark on the meter when you start,” Radioman said. “When you’re done, you get on”—he waved his hand at a converted exercycle connected to a generator—“and bring my battery back up to the mark. That’s expenses. Then there’s overhead—that’s for me. Food—my choice of your pack.”

  Chandliss nodded. “You do this full-time, then?”

  “Ain’t it enough? I keep the town in touch—get the news from Twin Falls or Pocatello once a week—talk to the hill families that still have CB’s—not so many of those, now. I’m the only thing this town has that touches what we used to be,” he said with stiff pride. “Now—where you callin’ to?”

  “Long distance.”

  “How long? Butte? Salt Lake? Portland? I can’t always raise Portland this time of day.”

  “West Virginia. Green Bank.”

  The radioman’s sideways glance was quick but meaningful. “I’ll have to get the government people in Boise for that. How are you gonna pay for it? Have cash?”

  “Yes. Can you accept it for them?”

  “Of course,” sniffed the Radioman. “I’ve got a contract. Name and number?”

  The scientist recited the number from memory. “I’ll talk to anyone there.” He stood back while the Radioman donned a headset and warmed up the equipment. He heard him explain to Boise what was wanted, and then Radioman covered the microphone. “Forty-five dollars paper or twenty in coin. Let me see it before I tell them to go ahead.” Wondering briefly if Radioman had added something to Boise’s price, he dug out the bills.

  “Okay,” Radioman said into the microphone. “Do it.” The wait seemed longer than it really was. Finally Radioman doffed the headset and turned on his stool. “Number’s out of service. Anything else, while I have Boise?”

  The National Radio Observatory had been at Green Bank; with it apparently closed, Chandliss had no hopes for anything else on the continent. Still, he had to try. On the way into Ketchum, he had, with the help of an assortment of invented mnemonics, committed to memory as many numbers as his tattered address book had contained. He had hoped that he would have no need for them.