“Sorry, Gordon, had to finish that—say, you look kinda worn out. This weather got you down, fella?”
Gordon shook his head and rose, following Ramsey to a side office. A slight giddiness swarmed through him. Must be the air in here, he thought. That, and the Santa Ana, and his shallow, momentary sleep of the night before.
Ramsey was already several sentences ahead of him before Gordon registered the fact. “What?” he said, his voice a croak from the dryness.
“I said, the clues were all there. I was just too blind to see them.”
“Clues?”
“At first I was just looking for preliminary data. You know, something to kick off a grant, get the funding agencies interested. Defense, I guess. But that’s the point, Gordon—this is bigger than DOD now. NSF should go for it.”
“Why?”
“It’s big, that’s why. That line, ‘enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host’—that’s the giveaway. I took a solution like the one that message described. You know, land runoff stuff, pesticides, some heavy metals—cadmium, nickel, mercury. Threw in some long-chain molecules, too. Had a grad student make them up. Lattitine chain, like the message said. Got a friend at DuPont to loan me some of their experimental long-chain samples.”
“Could you find the labeling numbers the message gave?”
Ramsey frowned. “Nope, that’s the puzzler. This buddy of mine says they don’t have anything’ called that. And Springfield claims they don’t have an AD45 pesticide, either. Your signal must’ve got messed up there.”
“So you couldn’t duplicate it.”
“Not exactly—but who needs exactly? What these long-chain babies are is versatile.”
“How can you be—”
“Look, I took the batches down to Scripps. Took Hussinger out to lunch, talked up the project. Got him to give me some sea water testing troughs. They’re first class—constant temperature and salinity, steady monitoring, the works. Lots of sunlight, too. And—” he paused, compressing a smile—“the whole damn thing came true. Every bit.”
“The diatom bloom part, you mean?”
“Sure, only that’s a later stage. Those long-chain bastards go like Poncho, I tell ya. That sea water started out ordinary, super-saturated with oxygen. After two months we started getting funny readings on the oxygen column. That’s a measurement of the oxygen budget in a vertical column of water, maybe thirty meters high. Then the plankton started to go. Just crapped out on us—dead, or funny new forms.”
“How?”
Ramsey shrugged. “Your message says ‘virus imprinting.’ Mumbo-jumbo, I think. What’s virus got to do with sea water?”
“What has a pesticide got to do with plankton?”
“Yeah, good point. We don’t know. That other phrase you had—’can then convert plankton neuro jacket into its own chemical form using ambient oxygen content until level falls to values fatal to most of the higher food chain’—sounds like somebody knows, right?”
“Apparently.”
“Yeah, ’cause that’s smack on what we found.”
“It scavenges the oxygen?”
“And how.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Spreads like a sonofabitch, too. That mixture turns the plankton into itself, seems like. Makes some pretty lethal side products, too—chlorinated benzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, all kinds of crap. Have a squint at this.”
A photograph, produced with a flourish from a folder. A lean fish on a concrete slab, eyes glazed. Its lips bulged, green and laced with filaments of blue. A pale sore beneath the gills.
“Lip cancers, assymetries, tumors—Hussinger turned white when he saw what it did to his sample stock. See, he usually doesn’t worry about pathogens getting into the troughs. Sea water is cold and salty. It kills disease-carriers, all except some…”
Gordon noticed the pause. “Except what?”
“Except some viruses, Hussinger said.”
“Uh huh. ‘Virus imprinting.’ And these fish—”
“Hussinger isolated my troughs and stopped it. All my sample fish died.”
The two men stared at each other. “I wonder who’s using it down in the Amazon,” Ramsey said softly.
“Russians?” The possibility now seemed quite real to Gordon.
“Where’s the strategic advantage?”
“Maybe it’s some kind of accident.”
“I dunno… You still don’t know why you’re getting this over your NMR rig?”
“No.”
“That Saul Shriffer crap—”
Gordon waved it away. “Not my idea. Forget it.”
“We can’t forget this.” Ramsey held up the fish photo.
“No, we can’t.”
“Hussinger wants to publish right away.”
“Go ahead.”
“You sure this isn’t a DOD thing you’re working on?”
“No, look—that was your idea.”
“You didn’t knock it down.”
“Let’s say I didn’t want to expose my source. You can see what happened when Shriffer got hold of it.”
“Yeah.” Ramsey peered at him, a distant and assessing look. “You’re pretty sly.”
Gordon thought this was unfair. “You brought up the DOD angle. I said nothing.”
“Okay, okay Tricky, though.”
Gordon wondered if Ramsey was thinking to himself, Shifty Jew. But he caught himself as he thought it. Christ, what paranoia. He was getting to sound like his mother, always sure the goyim were out to get you.
“Sorry about that,” Gordon said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t, well…”
“Hey, that’s okay. No big deal. Hell, you put me onto a fantastic thing. Really important.”
Ramsey tapped the photograph. Both men stared at it, reflecting. A silence fell between them. The fish’s lips were swollen balloons, the colors horribly out of place. In the quiet Gordon heard the lab outside the small office. The regular chugging and ticking went on unmindful of the two men, rhythms and forces, voices. Nucleic acids sought each other in the capillaries of glass. An acid smell cut the air. Enameled light descended. Ticktock ticktock.
• • •
Saul Shriffer gazed out from the cover of Life with a casual self-confidence, arm draped over a Palomar telescope mount. Inside, the story was titled BATTLING EXOBIOLOGIST. There were pictures of Saul peering at a photograph of Venus, Saul inspecting a model of Mars, Saul at the control panel of the Green Bank radio telescope. One paragraph dealt with the NMR message. Beside the big magnets stood Saul, with Gordon in the background. Gordon was looking into the space between the magnet poles, apparently doing nothing. Saul’s hand hovered near some wiring, about to fix it. The NMR signals were described as “controversial” and “strongly doubted by most astronomers.” Saul was quoted: “You take some chances in this field. Sometimes you lose. Them’s the breaks.”
• • •
“Gordon, your name is in here once. That’s all,” Penny said.
“The article’s about Saul, remember.”
“But that’s why he’s in here. He’s riding on your…”
Mocking: “My success.”
“Well, no, but…”
• • •
Gordon tossed the drawing on Ramsey’s desk. “Did I give you a copy of this?”
Ramsey picked it up and wrinkled his brow. “No. What is it?”
“Another part of the signal.”
“Oh yeah, I remember. It was on TV.”
“Right. Shriffer showed it.”
Ramsey studied the interweaving curves. “Y’know, I didn’t think anything of this at the time. But…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it looks like some sort of molecular chain to me. These dots…”
“The ones I connected up?”
“Yeah, I guess. You drew this first?”
“No, Saul unscrambled it from a coded sequence. What about them?”
“Well, maybe it’s not a
bunch of curves. Maybe the points are molecules. Or atoms. Nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorus.”
“Like in DNA.”
“Well, this isn’t DNA. More complicated.”
“More complicated, or more complex?”
“Crap, I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
“You think it has some relation to those long-chain molecules?”
“Could be.”
“Those in-house names. Dupont and Springsomething.”
“Dupont Analagan 58. Springfield AD45.”
“Could this be one of those?”
“Those products don’t exist, I told you.”
“Okay, okay. But could they be that kind of thing?”
“Maybe. Maybe. Look, why don’t I see if I can figure this thing out.”
“How?”
“Well, try assigning atoms to the sites in the chains. See what works.”
“The way Crick and Watson did DNA?”
“Well, yeah, something like that.”
“Great. Maybe that’ll unravel some of—”
“Don’t count on it. Look, the important thing is the experiment. The oxygen loss, the fish. Hussinger and I are going to publish that right away.”
“Good, fine, and—”
“You don’t mind?”
“Huh? Why?”
“I mean, Hussinger says he thinks we should publish it together. If you and I want to do a paper on the message and its content; Hussinger says, that’s another—”
“Oh, I see.” Gordon rocked back in his chair. He felt worn down.
“I mean, I don’t go along with him on that one, but…”
“No, never mind. I don’t care. Publish it, for Chrissakes.”
“You don’t mind?”
“All I did was say, look into it. So you looked and you found something. Good.”
“It wasn’t my idea, this Hussinger thing.”
“I know that.”
“Well, thanks. Really. Look, I’ll follow up on this chain picture you got here.”
“If it is a chain.”
“Yeah. But I mean, maybe we can publish that. Together.”
“Fine. Fine.”
• • •
The resonance curves remained smooth. However, the noise level continued to rise. Gordon spent more of his time in the laboratory, trying to suppress the electromagnetic sputter. He had most of his lecture notes for the graduate course in Classical Electromagnetism finished, so he was free to pursue research. He abandoned his sample preparation, however, in favor of more time on the NMR rig. Cooper was still digesting his own data. The noise would not go away.
CHAPTER THIRTY
1998
HE BANGED THE OUTER OFFICE DOOR SHUT AND thumped across the old broad-boarded flooring. He had a respectably ancient office, just off Naval Row, but at times he would just as soon have had less oiled wood and more modern air-conditioning. Ian Peterson, returning from a morning-long meeting, dumped a file of papers on his desk. His sinuses had a stuffed, cottony feel. Meetings invariably did that. He had felt a thin haze descend on his mind as the meeting progressed, sealing him off from much of the tedious detail and bickering. He knew the effect from years of experience; fatigue at so much talk, so many qualified phrases, so many experts covering their asses with carefully impersonal judgments.
He shook off the mood and thumbed into his desktop Sek. First, a list of incoming calls, arranged by priority. Peterson had carefully sorted out names into lists, so the answering Sek computer would know whether to alert him. The list changed weekly, as he moved from problem to problem. People who had once worked with him on a project had an annoying tendency to assume that they could then ring him up about continuing secondary issues, even months or years later.
Second, incoming memos, flagged with deadlines for reply.
Third, personal messages. Nothing there this time except a note from Sarah about her bloody party.
Fourth, news items of interest, broken down into abstracts. Last, minor unclassifiable items. No time for that today. He reviewed category One.
Hanschman, probably wailing about the metals problem. Peterson deflected that one to an assistant by typing in a three-letter symbol. Ellehlouh, the North African, with a last-gasp plea for more fly-ins to the new drought region. That he routed up to Opuktu. He was the officer in charge of selecting who got the grain and molasses shipments; let him take the flak. Call from that Kiefer in La Jolla, flagged urgent. Peterson picked up his telephone and punched through. Busy. He stabbed Repeat Call and said “Dr. Keifer” so the tape could add it to the “Mr. Peterson of the World Council is urgently trying to reach” message which now would try Kiefer’s number every twenty seconds.
Peterson turned to the memos and brightened. He punched for a screening of his own memo, dictated while riding to work this morning and machine-typed. He had never tried the system before.
deployed system is in the Gulf Stream hope I’ve got those capitalizations right off the Atlantic coast of Miami period yes. There is a four not oh special spelling button. I suppose k-n-o-t, there, a four knot current steady and reliable. Those currents rotate the giant turbine fans, producing enough electricity for all Florida. The turbines are admittedly huge, 500 meters in diameter. However, I would paraphrase the technical discussion as saying they are basically Victorian engineering. Large and simple. Their floating hull is 345 meters long and they hang fully 25 meters below the surface. That’s enough for passing ships to run safely over. The anchoring cables have to go down that’s t-w-o miles in some places. That is minor compared to the cables carrying power to land, but technical branch says that probably has no bad side effects either.
Our projections are that the nearest candidates—natural gas from seaweed and ocean thermal energy conversion—are hopelessly behind Coriolis. The name, as you undoubtedly know and I didn’t, springs from a French mathematician who had a hand in showing why ocean currents go as they do. Effects of the earth’s rotation and so on.
The snags are obvious. Having 400 of these slowing the Gulf Stream might be dicey. The weather pattern for much of the Atlantic Ocean hinges on that current, which sweeps by the US and Canada and then out to sea and back to the Caribbean is that the spelling must be. A full-scale numerical simulation on the omni all caps OMNI computer shows a measurable effect of one percent. Safe enough, by current guidelines.
Negative political impact is minimal. Introducing 40 gigawatts to that area will silence criticism of our halt to fishing, I should believe. I therefore advise prompt approvals. Yours sincerely et cetera.
Peterson grinned. Remarkable. They even assigned the most probable homonym. He corrected the piece and sent it off through the electronic labyrinth to Sir Martin. Committee flotsam and jetsam was for the assistants; Sir Martin saved his time for judgments, the delicate balancing act above the flood of information. He had taught Peterson a good deal, all the way down to such fine points as how to speak on a committee where your opponents are lying in wait. Sir Martin would pause and breathe in the middle of his sentences, then rush past the period at the end and on for a clause or two into the next sentence. No one knew when to make a smooth interruption.
Peterson asked his Sek for an update. He found the Kiefer call still facing the blank buzzing of a busy signal, and two underlings leaving recorded messages he would check later.
He reclined in his armchair and studied his office wall. Quite an array, yes. Pseudoparchment citations for bureaucratic excellence. Photos of himself beside various charismatic sloganeers with their buzzword bibles. Practitioners of leaderbiz, smiling at the camera.
The committee meeting this morning had its share of those, along with earnest biochemists and numerical meteorologists. Their reports on the distribution of the clouds were unsettling but vague. The clouds were further examples of “biological cross function,” an all-purpose term meaning interrelations nobody had thought of yet. Apparently the circumpolar wind vortex, which had shifted towards the equator
in recent years, was picking up something from the region near the bloom. The unknown biological agents being carried by the clouds had caused withering of the Green Revolution crop strains. Besides giving uniform high yields, the Green Revolution plants also had uniform weaknesses. If one became diseased, they all did. How devastating the strange yellow-tan clouds might be was unknown. Something odd was in the biocycle, but research had not pieced together the puzzle as yet. The meeting had broken up into rivulets of indecision. Belgian biologists argued with plump disasterologists, neither with any hard evidence.
Peterson pondered what it might mean, while leafing through some reports. Inventories, assessments, speculative calculations, order-of-magnitude truths. Some were in the clunky gingerbread of Cyrillic, or the swoops of Arabic script, or Asia’s ant squiggles, or the squared-off machine type of ModEng. A tract on Erdwisenschaft made man a minor statistical nuisance, a bug skittering over a world reduced to nouns and numbers. Peterson was at times entranced by the mix of minds in the World Council, the encyclopedic power they tapped. Voices, a babble of voices. There was the furious energy of the Germans; the austere and finally constricting logic of la bella France; the Japanese, smothered now in industrial excess; strangely sad Americans, still strong but like an aging boxer, swinging at sparring partners no longer there; the Brazilians, wandering now onto the world stage, blinking into the spotlight, dazed. Several years ago he had gone on a tour of Ethiopia with a clucking band of international future-seers and watched their calculus collide with life. In dusty red-rocked gorges he had seen men attacking and scattering ant hills to snatch away the crumbs of wheat stored there. Naked women, colored like mud and with thin sacks for breasts, climbed mimosa trees to clip the green shoots of fresh growth, for soup. Children gathered stuff like briars, to chew for moisture. Trees were stripped bare of bark, gnawed at the roots. Skeletons baked white and luminous near brackish water holes.
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