“Then it’s…it’s. Christ. Did you invent this thing?”
“Not quite. Let’s say I discovered it. And of course, all that I have here is a demonstration model. To be really useful, the cylinder ought to be as big as this room, then it could carry people. I didn’t have the facilities to do that in the university machine shop, and anyway, that’s not my department. It’s yours. All I wanted to do is be sure it worked.”
“Is it anti-gravity?” Jacobsen peered at the red button on top of the smooth surface. “When you pressed it to that second position, it just went straight up.”
“That’s right. But it’s more than anti-gravity, because it can go at a constant speed in any direction I choose. And it does a lot more even than that. See the other three settings? The first one puts the cylinder into a state of constant acceleration, for as long as the timer is set. I’ve tested it outside, and it went up, faster and faster, for twenty seconds. If I hadn’t programed it to switch off and return to its starting point, I guess it would just have kept on going forever. I’ve only tested the other settings in a lab environment, so there could be a surprise or two. But the fourth position seems to be a constant rate of increase of acceleration. You’d have to be careful with that in a passenger version. Even with only a tenth of a gravity increase per second—and it can do a lot more than that—you’d be up to six gee in one minute, enough to start flattening everyone on board. By that time you’re going a mile a second. You’d make a sizable dent in anything you hit. Don’t touch that setting, by the way, I have no timer in the program.”
Jacobsen put the cylinder down on the desk and pulled his hand away as though the plastic had suddenly become radioactive.
“The fifth position, though.” Bates casually retrieved the object. “That’s the real pay dirt. The unit just seems to disappear for a moment, then appear again at some pre-set distance away. I haven’t been able to use separations big enough to measure the transition speed, but I know it’s very fast. Maybe instantaneous.”
The other man’s face had been moving through a sequence of expressions as Bates described the functions of the flattened cylinder, running from amazement and disbelief to nervousness, and finally to squint-eyed cunning. When Bates finished speaking, the admiral sat in silence for a few seconds, drumming pudgy fingers on the desk top.
“What’s the power source? Some humongous generator, somewhere?”
“No. What you see is what you get. It doesn’t have one. I’m not a physicist, but from what I’ve been reading it has to draw its energy from vacuum fluctuations. There’s no practical limit.”
“You say you didn’t invent it?”
“I discovered it. Sort of stumbled across it.”
“So where’s the guy who did invent it. Why isn’t he here?”
“There isn’t any other guy.” Bates raised a skinny hand. “Look, I know that what I’m going to tell you sounds off the wall, but the important thing is this.” He hefted the cylinder. “You don’t have to trust me. Fix your eyes on this whenever what I have to say sounds strange to you. The machine’s real. You’re seeing it work. Keep that in your head.”
Bates turned the dial on top of the cylinder and moved the stud to its first setting. The unit rose to hover in the air just above eye-level, between the two men.
“Let’s start easy,” Bates continued. “While you’ve been here at NASA you must have had questions about flying saucers, and visitors from space.”
Jacobsen snorted. “Too damned many. We get a new inquiry every day. I told my staff what to tell ’em, that there’s been a dozen investigations and they all show it’s a bunch of garbage. Don’t do much good, though, next day there’s some other nut case on the line. I hope you’re not going to sit there and tell me that a little man in a flying saucer dropped in on you and gave you the gadget?”
“Not quite. But you’re warm. The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that somebody from far away did visit Earth, just the way your saucer fanatics insist. But it happened a long time ago. I don’t know quite when, but it was over twenty million years. And before you ask me anything else, let me say I have no idea what they looked like, or their main reason for coming here. Whatever it was, they decided they’d leave a gift behind when they left. You’re looking at it—the secret of easy access to space. Probably of interstellar travel, too, with that fifth setting.”
“Wait a minute.” Jacobsen was puffing furiously on his cigar, scowling from beneath those fierce eyebrows. “First you tell me you didn’t invent it. Now you’re saying they left it, whoever the hell they are. But you also said you built it.”
“I did build it. What they left were instructions as to how to do it. I could follow the directions, but I still don’t know why it works.”
“Instructions?” Jacobsen’s fat cheeks were turning crimson. Overdue for a stroke, he seemed to have decided that now was the time. “Instructions! Written in English, I suppose. Buggsie, I’ve had enough of this. You never did know when to stop joshing. If you think I was born yesterday—?”
“Look at the machine, Porky. See it, hanging there? Have faith. Not instructions in English, of course not. Not in any human language. The instructions came as coded digit sequences, and they had to be deciphered. Your SETI friends waiting down on the fifth floor have worried the same problem for a long time: if you did receive a signal from space that was of artificial origin, how would you figure out the message?” Bates had finally lit his cigar, and now he was staring thoughtfully at the glowing tip. “You know, I used to be quite a SETI fan myself, but when you look at it logically, sending radio signals here from space is a terrible way to communicate with anybody. If you’re not listening at just the right time with an antenna pointing in the right direction, the signal has been and gone while you’re looking the other way. It’s worse than putting a note in a bottle, and throwing it into the ocean. Much better to do it this way, leave a message here, where it will be around whenever someone gets smart enough to look for it.”
He glanced up at Jacobsen. “Where was I? I flew the redeye from the Coast to get here, and I’m feeling a bit muzzy. Anyway, after a while I became convinced that what I had found was a message, but it took me forever to decipher it. The digital signal was a string of binary numbers, tens of millions of bits long. I knew it wasn’t random, but I couldn’t read it. Finally I discovered that the key was to convert the long string of digital signal into a two-dimensional array, laying a thousand and twenty-four digits down as each row, and then viewing the result as a pictorial form. And then I still had to puzzle out what the pictures meant. You see, until I actually had a working model, I couldn’t be sure what I was building. For a while, I wondered if I might be making a gadget that would blow up the whole world—a sort of self-sterilizing device, left on Earth to get rid of any species smart enough to expand off the planet.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Then I decided, what the hell, I’d build it anyway. I’ve learned a lot about animals. Humans might be that sneaky and horrible, but nothing else would.”
The bright red had receded from Jacobsen’s face, but he was stirring restlessly in his chair. “How many people have you told about all this, Buggsie? The message, and everything else?”
“Hardly anyone. Just a couple of coworkers at the lab, and I don’t think they believed me. And as soon as I finished the working model I headed straight here.”
“No public talks? No papers written?”
“None. Before I had a working model there was a problem of, let’s say, credibility. This sort of thing isn’t my academic specialty, and electronics is only a hobby. I’d have been laughed at until I had proof. Then when I had this working, I decided it was too important for anything like the usual publication route. We’re talking a major press conference.”
“Sure.” Jacobsen picked up the interoffice phone and said: “Trustrum? Postpone my meeting with the SETI group. I know
, I know. Screw ’em. And send a security officer up here to my office. Second thoughts, better make that two security officers, OK?”
He turned to Bates. “Buggsie, in the last year at the Academy I had you blackballed for the Jacks-off Five Society because I said you were all brains and no common sense. I have to apologize for that. I was wrong. You did exactly the right thing coming here to me without telling anybody. Do you realize the importance of what you have there?”
“Of course I do.” Bates was scowling. “Why do you think I came to NASA? This gives us the stars—as it was designed to do.”
“Nuts to the stars.” Jacobsen walked across to the door to make sure it was securely closed. “I get too much crap in this job about stars and black holes and galaxies. That’s for those SETI fruitcakes and their buddies in their meeting on the fifth floor. What we need right now are the planets. And that means a low-cost system to get off Earth, for starters. Navy and I took over NASA with a mission: to make it get its act together. The name of the space game today is easy access. I don’t give the Russians credit for much, but they have the right attitude when they say that the upper atmosphere is the shore of the universe. The first real spacefaring nation will control the solar system, the way that Spain and Portugal and England used to control the seas. And that’s going to be us, not a bunch of Russians and Japanese and Chinese and Frenchmen.” He stared at Bates. The other man was shaking his head and there was a tired smile on his face. “We can do it, Buggsie. What you’re holding in your hand guarantees it.”
“It gives humanity easy access to space. Not just America.”
“Oh, sure. Others will get to go eventually—they’ll ride our coattails. But you had the same history lessons as I did, back at the Academy, and you know how the world works. Control the ports, and you control everything else. Trade follows the flag. Our flag.” Bates sighed. “Porky, I hoped for better things from you. I read all those noble things you said when you were testifying at the hearings to become head of NASA. I conceive it as my sacred duty to build a staircase, one that will allow all of humanity to ascend to the stars. And I was dumb enough to believe you meant what you said. I’m delivering the staircase to you, but you want to restrict its use. Well, it doesn’t make any difference what you want to do, or what I want to do. This staircase can’t be kept secret.”
“We’ll see about that.” There was a buzz on the office phone, and Jacobsen levered himself out of his chair and went to open the door Two jg’s stood to attention outside. Jacobsen nodded to them.
“I want you to stand guard as long as this meeting is going on. We’re at TS level in here until further notice.” He closed the door and returned to his desk. “Buggsie, you’ve spent too long in that ivory tower. Isn’t it obvious that what you’ve shown me makes this a national security issue, too? The future of this whole country is at stake, and if that”—he pointed at the cylinder, still hovering above the desk—“got into the wrong foreign hands, our defense systems wouldn’t be worth a packet of peanuts. You started out right, coming to me. Don’t blow it now. Work with Navy, and you’ll be sitting right on the inside—I’ll make sure you get all the clearances, and if you need money one of my contractors can write you a nice fat subcontract. But don’t give me any crap about this being ‘too important to keep secret.’ Let me tell you, anything can be kept secret, if the screws are turned down tight enough. And this has to be.”
Bates laid his dead cigar down on the desk ashtray. For the past two minutes he had forgotten to smoke it. “You still don’t understand, Porky. I said this can’t be kept secret, no matter how much you or I might want to do that. I told you I found a message. Where do you imagine I found it, written on a wall somewhere?”
Jacobsen glowered. “Damned if I know. But it was somewhere in this country, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I haven’t been abroad for over ten years.”
“Then let me tell you something, Buggsie old buddy. I spent years in Naval Intelligence, and I can guarantee that we’ll be able to put a lid on the place—any place in the U.S. of A.—where that message came from; a cap so tight Harry Houdini couldn’t get his little finger in or out of it. And we can make sure nothing appears in the press, and nothing gets published. Your space transport system will be produced in a maximum security environment that makes standard DOD Top Secret facilities look leaky as colanders. If that’s not keeping a secret, I don’t know what is.”
“It won’t work.” Bates gestured at the hovering cylinder. “You say you thought I had no common sense. Use yours, Porky, if you have any left after twenty years of military BS. Suppose you were an alien, visiting Earth twenty million years ago, and you wanted to leave a message that could be read today. What would you do?”
Jacobsen puffed out his full cheeks. “Carve it somewhere permanent, on rock, or on a steel plate. No, gold or glass would be better. But twenty million years…”
“You’re getting there.” Bates had an irritating smile on his face. “Take your time. Twenty million—not two hundred, or two hundred thousand. No artifact on Earth is that old. Any message would be worn away by the weather in less than a million years, so anything left on the surface would be eroded or buried hundreds of feet deep. Think, Porky. Twenty million.”
“It’s impossible. Nothing can last that long.”
“Right. That’s what I wanted you to conclude. Nothing we could build would be recognizable twenty million years in the future.”
“Not on Earth. But maybe if you left it on the Moon, where there’s no weather to wear it out…”
“Hey, nice try. I didn’t expect that. But you’d still have to worry about meteor impact. There’s a better way, right here on Earth. A way that allows messages to persist for hundreds of millions of years, with small danger of being lost. And it’s a form of recording we almost know how to do ourselves, if we wanted to.”
Jacobsen growled his annoyance. “I know you think you’re so damn smart, Buggsie, you always did. It sounds impossible, but if you’re going to tell me, get on with it. And while you’re at it you can tell me why you found this, and nobody else.”
“Because I smell of ape-shit and bear-shit. I told you I wasn’t a physicist, but I didn’t tell you what I am. I’m a biologist—a molecular biologist. And one of the hottest topics today in molecular biology is DNA sequencing. Do you know anything about it?”
“Never heard of it, and I’m not sure I want to.”
“You do, if you follow Government research financing. DNA is the molecule that carries genetic information. DNA also gets duplicated, unchanged except for very rare mutations, every time a cell divides. The Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health have been given a billion dollars each to do DNA mapping of humans.”
“A billion?” Jacobsen was finally dealing with something he understood. “That’s not chickenfeed.”
“Not even by Defense Department standards.”
“Sounds like another big R&D boondoggle to me. NASA is full of ’em.”
“No. This one is important. You see, the DNA of an organism decides exactly what that organism is. If I specify your DNA, in full, I specify you. It might sound easy to do that, because although a DNA molecule is shaped like a double helix—a pair of interlocking spirals—you can think of it as one long string, open-ended or joined in a circle, of just four different chemicals called nucleotide bases. The chemicals are thymine, adenine, guanine, and cytosine—”
“In English, goofball. You’re starting to gibber.”
“Sorry, Porky. I forgot you’re a meathead. Just think of the bases in terms of their initials, T, A, G, and C, and imagine you have a whole lot of beads, with one of those letters written on each. Now you can make a necklace using those beads, with no restriction on which bead sits at which position on the necklace. A complete DNA sequence—it’s called a genome—is just the listing of the order of the beads along the spi
ral necklace. That’s enough to describe the organism completely. The difference between me and you and a cabbage or a mosquito or a chicken is in the length of the DNA sequence, and the order of the four chemicals along the sequence. The trouble is, were talking of billions of beads for any sort of complex organism. Genome mapping is a monstrous job.”
“And a damned useless one, I’d have said. What’s the good of it?”
“All sorts of things. If we knew the DNA mapping exactly we could tackle all sorts of hereditary diseases. That’s been known for thirty years. But techniques to map the DNA sequence, and find the exact order of the T, A, G, and C beads on the genetic necklace are more recent, ten years old or less. We do it using electron microscopes and crystallography and other chemicals called restriction enzymes. That’s what I do. I’m good at it. The Department of Energy gave me a grant of a million dollars to look at a particular question relating to DNA sequencing, what you might call the problem of junk DNA that doesn’t seem to do anything useful.
“You see, the DNA in any cell tells that cell how to operate, especially how to produce proteins. So you might think that every bit of DNA would be used that way. But it isn’t. As little as ten percent of the DNA is used to control production processes in the cell. So what’s the rest of it there for? Nobody knows. And yet the introns, those intervening sequences that don’t direct production of cell materials, can make up nine-tenths of the total DNA. My grant was to examine the introns, and see if I could discover what purpose they serve.”
Bates had been sitting completely motionless in his chair. With the explanation almost over, he seemed exhausted. Now he stirred, picked up the cigar again, and pointed with it at the hovering cylinder. “So here’s the exciting bit. I found out, Porky. At least, I found out part of the answer. It’s right there, hanging in front of you. Somebody planted a message, over and over again, in the introns, in the DNA sequences that look at first sight like some sort of junk. All I did was discover it and decode it.”
Dancing With Myself Page 22