Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

  "Finally, I want to say how much pride I have in you all. We've gone through a terrible misfortune, and although I've seen reports of looting and crimes against persons, by far the majority of you have reacted admirably, by helping people in trouble, by sharing personal property and resources available to you, and by generously aiding strangers. That makes me very proud. And I want you to know that law and order has been restored. The fire department is ready to roll, and all hospital emergency numbers and hot lines are functional.

  "You have all done a splendid job of coping, and I'll pass on news of any new developments as they happen.

  "Good night, Manhattan."

  #

  Dr. Bobby Joe Brewster turned down the sound on his small office TV.

  He leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the desk, still amazed at how much quieter the Columbia campus was now. He considered what the mayor had said. It would be an interesting challenge to try to decode alien transmissions if that was the goal.

  He glanced at his computer. Cut off from Earth, he'd be deprived of his constant supply of new programs and upgrades. That had to be the worst aspect of this entire mess. The sooner they established communications, the sooner they could return to Earth, perhaps.

  Bobby Joe had grown up doing everything at a younger age than expected, so he had acquired a fair amount of public modesty to reduce the jealousy of people he was overtaking. Now wasn't the time for modesty, though. He was very likely to be one of the best people in the dome for what the mayor had talked about.

  He took his feet off the desk and leaned forward to reach the loop recorder on the desktop. He had it perpetually recording so he could always repeat anything from the previous thirty minutes. He touched the reverse control and sped the image back until the phone numbers came up on the small screen. When he found the right number, he froze the image.

  As he picked up the phone, he felt excited. If they got back to Earth, he could go back to eating real food.

  #

  Matt stepped out of the elevator onto the 105th floor, five floors below the observation deck on the southern tower of the World Trade Center, just as thankful as he could be that the power had been restored.

  The hallway was quiet as he turned toward the south wall, but the sounds of activity from inside a large office ahead grew louder as he approached. He entered the room. Near the windows was a group of journalists, some with their lenses directed at the scenery outside, some focused on the activity at the center of the room, all of them under strict notice that any disruption to the workers would mean immediate expulsion.

  The room reminded him of a combat operations center, with large wall–screens covering most surfaces, but no combat operations center he'd ever been in had a view like that out the south window. For a moment, he ignored the activity in the room and walked to the window. From here, the reflections from the top of the bubble were only a hundred meters away, and Matt knew the bubble almost touched the WTC observation deck not too far over his head.

  A dozen bubbles poked out of the gray plain below. Two of them rose even higher than the World Trade Center. In each bubble, the ground was roughly level with the plain. Matt drew in his breath involuntarily even though he had seen these domes before. One dome contained what looked to be a large hill with bluish grassy–covered slopes and scattered black spots that Matt assumed to be cave or tunnel openings. No recognizable sign of intelligent life showed on the surface.

  The strangest enclosed habitat, to Matt's naked eye, was an impossibly tall and thin bubble surrounding a trio of incredibly high trees with huge circular, sun–tracking, yellow–green leaves. In the middle of the triangle formed by the trees was an alien version of a city. Huge ropes looped around the giant tree branches suspended a series of woven structures rising vertically in a column that seemed to be fifty percent taller than the World Trade Center. String–like tubes from the dim recesses overhead stretched down and connected at points all the way up and down the dome, which looked more like an inverted test tube than anything else. Matt wondered if someone in that dome were watching him.

  "I still get the shivers looking out there," said a feminine voice next to him.

  Matt turned and found Abby standing nearby. "Me, too. Sometimes I just want to refuse to believe it somehow."

  Abby stood silently looking out the window until Matt said, "I really appreciate your help in getting things organized up here. You're a hard worker."

  "And you're not?"

  Matt smiled and ignored the question. "On the observation deck, they told me the new camera seems to be fully functional. What does it look like down here?"

  "Take a look." Abby motioned him over to one of the wall screens.

  The screen she directed him to displayed a large image of the message on the top of the dome. Abby said, "Bobby Joe set up a frame buffer, so we've got this good image to work from while the cameras are busy looking at other things." In a semicircle before the screen sat four more linguists with their computers, busily trying to make sense of the message. The message itself looked even stranger in close up. Five large shapes were each composed of several smaller shapes, which in turn were composed of smaller shapes that could have been icons or crude pictures. Matt had no idea if some of the sub–elements were merely elements of characters like the three straight lines in a capital "A" or if somehow even the small elements contained significance of their own.

  "You make anything of it so far?" Matt asked.

  Abby shook her head, and her blonde hair swayed. "Obviously it's going to be tougher than finding clues based on similarities to a lot of our known languages. What we need first is a conceptual breakthrough, something that will get us a start on figuring out generically what kind of message they're trying to tell us or what basis they have for communication."

  "This may be a stupid question, but what if the message is reversed? I mean what if it reads correctly from the top of the dome, or what if they write from bottom to top, or some other variation?"

  "Right now we're trying to stay open to any possibility. The computer can easily make mirror–image versions and other views, so we can look at it in a number of ways."

  "I don't envy you your job. I wouldn't know where to start."

  "I'm not sure we do, either. I wish we could see the people who wrote that message. We might be able to get some clues from their appearance."

  Motion on a nearby screen caught Matt's eye, and he and Abby moved on. Across one wall was a huge mosaic screen, showing high–resolution views of over a dozen habitats, most apparently in normal color, a couple of them obviously false–color enhancements. At a controlling computer where he could see all the screens was Dr. Bobby Joe Brewster, the electronics and video whiz who had responded to the mayor's calls for expert help. He hadn't even waited for morning, but had come right over after the broadcast and met the crew.

  "What do you have going, Bobby Joe?" asked Matt as they approached. Matt had to ask twice to break the man's concentration.

  "Oh, hi. God, isn't this terrific? I know people who would have let someone nail them into a coffin for a year just to have a shot at something like this. I mean, just look at all those cities."

  Bobby Joe was in his mid–twenties, with blue eyes and a skull shaved bald. He radiated excitement and enthusiasm. Fortunately, from Matt's point of view, he also radiated competence. Matt still felt he should be calling the man "Dr. Brewster" after seeing the article in Time Multimedia Magazine. Bobby Joe had used computers to find a solution to a long–standing control–system problem that had baffled more than one genius. He'd been a child prodigy, moving so rapidly through correspondence classes that he'd been called in for a spot quiz that lasted an entire day. After that session, no one had any doubts that Bobby Joe honestly knew everything he claimed to know. He was on the Columbia staff working with experts at least a decade or more older than he was.

  Bobby Joe had been a great help in configuring several cameras and the computer systems, a
nd Matt was sure his usefulness was far from ending.

  Bobby Joe pointed at a section of the screen in the lower left. As he did, the view changed very slightly. "I've got one of the cameras cycling through a sequence of sixteen cities. On each pass, I grab the latest image and plop it up on the screen. I've got the computer doing some quick comparisons between each successive frame, so it can sound an alarm if something significant changes."

  As Matt watched the wall mosaic, one at a time the views of each city flickered as a new image replaced the previous one. One of the views showed an immense perfect cube with the visible surfaces divided into a sixty–four–square chessboard pattern, half of the squares with a brown tint, half with an orange tint. Each of the sixty–four surfaces seemed to be further subdivided into sixty–four smaller squares where every other tiny square on the sides was black. On the top of the gigantic structure, the non–tinted squares were white.

  Two other cities were also cubic, one of them with lots of open air. An enormous structure of girders formed the cube itself. Thirty or forty horizontal girders at equal intervals lined each side, and in turn supported sets of horizontal girders that ran through the cube at each level. From that network of girders hung individual boxes like small buildings of varying sizes. The screen had enough resolution for Matt to see creatures that resembled large caterpillars. One was in the process of leaving one building and going to another by first spanning the gap with the front of its body, then shifting most of its body to the destination, and finally pulling its tail end in after it.

  The other cubic city was one huge building with large, irregularly spaced round windows. Matt couldn't see anything through the windows.

  One of the cities was completely concealed from view. All that showed under a very short dome was a mound of red dirt reminiscent of an anthill. Matt assumed the rest of the city lay under the surface of the ground.

  Matt said, "Have you seen any species that looks more like—"

  He was interrupted by a chiming sound from the computer.

  "Hang on," Bobby Joe said. "We may have something interesting here." He gave several commands with the keyboard, and a blinking box formed around one of the city views. That view grew to occupy half of the large screen. The resolution made the alien city look like it was just on the other side of a large window. In very general terms, the city looked more like Manhattan than did most of the cities. It was generally level, with walkways on the surface of the ground. On the land lay an array of mostly conic structures, like large tee–pees, some much taller than others. At the top of one of the tallest cones, Matt could see a light that changed colors in a seemingly random pattern, as though he were watching just one square centimeter of a large screen showing a TV broadcast.

  Bobby Joe tapped on the keyboard, and he centered a small circle on the light source. "Let's set up a real–time oscillograph."

  A square appeared on one side of the image, with a dotted line between the light source and the graph. In the graph box was a vertical spectrum bar, the color ranging from red at the bottom to blue at the top, and a continuously moving trace appeared, showing the color versus time. The moving point drew a sine wave extending higher than blue on the scale, and then began drawing what seemed to be noise. It went back to a sine wave for a couple of seconds, and then back to noise.

  Bobby Joe leaned back in his chair. "I do believe someone's trying to talk to us."

  Chapter 4

  Video Games

  Rudy stepped up into the cherry–picker cab with Nicholas. The driver took them south without needing to be asked.

  "Where's the closest one of these new tubes?" Rudy asked.

  Nicholas took out a handkerchief and patted some sweat on his forehead. "About where the Wall Street helipad used to be."

  Once they were on the South Street Viaduct, they made good time. The driver stopped the truck in the northbound lane closest to the edge of the dome. Rudy and Nicholas took the cherry–picker cage into space over the edge of the viaduct, moving closer and closer to the connection point between the dome and a blue hose that disappeared into the sky outside the dome. The circular junction looked unlike any of the others Rudy had seen so far. This one seemed to be a transparent membrane, a thin layer of flexible plastic wrapping stretched across the opening.

  Rudy looked at it for several seconds before he finally said, "Okay, I see it. Now what did you want to tell me about it?"

  Nicholas smiled smugly as he took a few paper clips from his pocket. "Here, take one."

  Rudy did.

  "Now toss it at that membrane."

  Rudy raised his eyebrows, and then did as Nicholas suggested. The paper clip sailed right toward the membrane and it hit. After that nothing happened. The paper clip just wasn't there anymore.

  Nicholas sailed another paper clip at the membrane. It, too, reached the thin layer and apparently ceased to exist.

  After a moment of considering the waste disposal ramifications, Rudy began to smile, too. "So, what you're telling me is that pretty soon we'll be able to flush our toilets again?"

  #

  Abby stared at the recording graph as her spine tingled. A bright dot on the left edge of the trace fluctuated up and down as it spewed a fine line to one side. The trace moved slowly to the right and disappeared as it reached the edge of the box as new data reminiscent of an electrocardiogram constantly replaced it.

  "I'll accept your statement that this implies an intelligent message, but it doesn't tell me anything yet," Abby said. She looked back at the screen showing the distant light source as it changed colors. The conical building supporting the light showed a dark line spiraling around it, reaching all the way from the top to the ground. She wondered if it were a spiral staircase.

  "Are you recording this?" Matt asked Bobby Joe. Several times earlier, Abby had caught Matt staring off into the distance, obviously sad, no doubt feeling the loss of his wife back on Earth. But now his expression was interested, showing none of the pain she'd seen before, and she was glad for him that he had something to take his mind off the woman he was so obviously in love with.

  Bobby Joe didn't turn from his chair in front of the small console, but he said, "You're nuking right."

  Matt turned to Abby. "It doesn't mean anything to me, either, but I'm willing to bet Bobby Joe can make some sense of it." He leaned over Bobby Joe's shoulder. "Where's it coming from? I mean which dome is it? I can see what it looks like, but where is it on the plain in relation to us?"

  Bobby Joe used the controls to change the view on a big screen next to the one showing the graph. At first the view included just the conical building the light came from, but then he made the camera zoom back more and more so the cone began to shrink to a dot as the dome containing it came into view, and then several more domes entered the sides of the picture. By the time the view stopped changing, it was obvious that the dome was one of the farthest ones away.

  "Just a sec." Bobby Joe hit some more controls, and the screen suddenly showed little green "X"s at the top of each dome. Then the domes vanished and the only thing left was the set of "X"s. One of the "X"s changed from green to red, the one where the transmitting dome had been. Finally, he tilted the display, so the band of "X"s spread vertically and the ones near the top spread out horizontally, and Abby could tell Bobby Joe had somehow translated the screen image to a crude top view map. Even as she realized that, a distance marker came on the screen, showing the length of one kilometer on that scale. The nearest dome was about ten kilometers away. The dome with the light must have been five times that far away. An octagonal outline showed on the screen, marking the boundaries of the huge area they were in. Manhattan was fairly near the center, and the transmitting dome was near one wall.

  "You're saying that dome is, what, over fifty kilometers from here?" Matt asked.

  "You got it," Bobby Joe said. He sounded pleased with being able to provide the information. Abby hadn't yet heard Bobby Joe sound in the least bit disturbed by r
ecent events; in fact, he seemed positively excited and intrigued.

  "So, what are they trying to tell us?"

  "You got me. But we can try a few things. Let's convert it to sound, and see what we get." Bobby Joe's fingers played over the controls, and a minute later every head in the room popped up as strange squawks came over speakers next to the screen. A second of noise like a radio receiver tuned to an empty channel was followed by a second of a clear tone a few octaves above middle C. Bobby Joe listened briefly and shook his head. "Let me speed it up."

  He traced his finger across a bar on the small screen in his console and the noise increased in pitch to the point that the tone became a repeating click, and the sound in between became high–pitched noise.

  "Okay, let's slow it down." Bobby Joe drew his finger across the screen right to left, and the noise dropped back to where it had been and continued getting deeper until the tone was so low that it rattled the tables in the room. The rumbling in between became no more intelligible.

  Bobby Joe hit some more keys. "Okay, let's try some video. If we assume the information between the sine waves is a picture built out of frame lines like a TV, then—then this is going to take me some time. Give me a couple of hours, okay?"

  #

  Julie Kravine reached the 105th floor in the south tower of the World Trade Center and the elevator doors opened.

  Directly in front of the doors was a guard. He took his feet off the table in front of him and stood. "I'll need to see some ID, miss, if you want to get past here."

  Surprised, Julie took out her card. "Isn't this a little unusual?"

  "It sure is. But the folks on this floor have already had a couple of crazies come up to kvetch about how they shouldn't be talkin' to aliens." The man checked her ID against a list that fit on one sheet of paper. "All right, Miss Kravine. Down that hall as far as you can go, then turn and it's the third door on the right."