‘Thank you… there and there…’
Professor Hirati peered at the rest of them over his fashionable glasses.
‘Your country really does need you, you know,’ he said, and Connie, despite herself, felt an odd thrill go up her spine. What could it possibly be? Some of her physicist colleagues had gone to work for defence companies and become very tight-lipped about what they actually did for a job, and GCHQ had a large team of code-breakers often taken from her specialty, but she had happily expected to fill out her career working on her beloved probability, teaching students, supervising exciting new work – this was taking an unexpected turn. She didn’t think much of this chap. But her country needing her… she stood up.
‘I’ll do it too,’ she said nervously. Professor Hirati gave her the same, slightly over-wide smile.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you. You are doing us a service.’
After that, all the boys and Evelyn followed suit, leaving just Arnold sitting there crossly.
‘This is invasion of privacy, man. You don’t know what our security services do with this stuff. Can’t trust anyone these days. The NSA will be all over all of us, do you know what I mean? Never sign anything.’
Professor Hirati frowned. This looked much more like his more natural expression.
‘I’m sorry about that, Doctor Li,’ he said, glancing at another pile of papers on his desk. ‘I truly am sorry about that. In fact, I think if you don’t take up our offer and therefore the fellowship… Well, I think that means your position in this country becomes untenable.’
Arnold’s normally friendly face was horrified.
‘You mean if I don’t join up for your bullshit operation you’re going to deport me?’
Professor Hirati shrugged.
‘I think, Doctor Li, if you can’t be for this country we have to assume you’re against it.’
Arnold was gobsmacked. ‘Are you shitting me? I can’t believe this…’
Sé came over to him. ‘Calm down, man. Calm down. It’s in the contract, man. You’ve signed them already. Just do it.’
‘But they’re saying they’re going to take my job away —’
‘Ssh. Look, you don’t know. It might be something cool!’
‘How can it be cool, man? Look at his sweater!’
Sé patted him on the shoulder.
‘You can go away and think about it.’
‘I’m afraid he can’t,’ said Professor Hirati briskly. ‘We can’t risk further discussion among you. If Doctor Li, or anyone else, wants to leave, they leave right now.’
The mood in the room had changed very fast, and nobody knew quite what to do.
After a long pause, Arnold looked at everyone round the desks, looked at the professor and swore profusely. Then he paused.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Give me the goddamn piece of paper, you bunch of little rat fink spy asses.’
He sat sullenly and scribbled his signature on it in tiny, messy handwriting, then threw it back across the desk without getting up. Professor Hirati picked it up solemnly and gave Arnold a long look. Arnold’s chubby cheeks had gone very pink, but he didn’t glance up.
‘Very good,’ said the professor. ‘And now, we shall hand over the rest of the papers in the morning and you can begin. No computers. No internet. No mentioning it to anyone. This work has already been filtered in every obvious and possible way we can think of. Now we need something direct from your perhaps slightly less obvious brains. Then we can rule it out, go on our way, and you can enjoy the rest of the year in the nicest surroundings we can think of. All right? You can talk about this to one another but absolutely nobody else at all. Nobody. We will find out, okay?’
The meeting broke up after that, a security guard closing the bunker door behind them. They walked back together, slowly down the cobbled roads.
‘What a dickwad,’ said Arnold, his heavy brow furrowed.
‘What do you think it is?’ Connie asked, but he shrugged, even as she went on.
‘Nuclear bomb threat statistics? Some hideous global warming maths they need done to check whether the world’s got five months to live or seven, and how many million people it’s worth saving to eat tins in a bunker? Something they don’t want the Star Boys to grubby their little paws with.’
Arnold shook his head.
‘Has to be cryptography, remember Hardy? Economy runs on the damn thing. Probably trying to stop the robots taking over. Skynet, man.’
Connie frowned. Evelyn caught her up.
‘What do you think?’ she said to her.
Evelyn just shook her head.
‘In my country, when government men turn up and want you to sign stuff, I can tell you it’s a one-way ticket to pain right there.’ And she walked on in silence.
‘OOH, sweepstake!’ Ranjit was saying, hopping up and down. Connie suspected he might be having the most exciting night of his life. ‘Let’s have a sweepstake! Winner buys pizza!’
Evelyn rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll be a frequency. Some kind of sunspot frequency. They’re going to want us to track it down, figure out what they can use it for. Microwave ovens, probably.’
‘Would they make you sign the Official Secrets Act for a new kind of oven?’ said Arnold scornfully.
‘They might,’ said Evelyn. ‘The college is probably owned by an oven manufacturer anyway. We probably just signed the Bosch Official Secrets Act.’
Connie felt slightly disappointed. It was true and entirely possible that it was something along those lines: a commercial – or worse, weaponisable – emanation along the wavelengths, and they were there to crunch the numbers before the head honchos brought in the engineers to manipulate it. Seemed a touch theatrical, but then Professor Hirati appeared to be a theatrical kind of a chap. Although why no computers?
‘Codes and crypto,’ Arnold said again. ‘Something a computer can’t break. And if we don’t give them the answer they want… Guantanamo Bay.’
‘You’ll never fit the jumpsuit,’ said Sé.
‘Shut up, Skeletor.’
Sé had up until now been walking along quietly, but he turned to them now.
‘Actually, did you not see where the paperwork was from?’
‘Go on then,’ said Arnold.
‘Area 51!’ said Ranjit excitedly.
‘Put the Haribo away, Ranjit,’ said Evelyn sternly.
Sé shook his head.
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘Mullard.’
Chapter Three
Having got undressed and managed the slight trick of getting up onto the astonishing four-poster bed, Connie lay on it, shifting about, completely unable to sleep. Why on earth hadn’t she smelt a rat before she took this job?
Because she had wanted to believe they wanted her, that was all. And maybe for this, she could be perfect. After all, computing power would only be helpful to a point. They could find regular patterns; sort and arrange and classify. But to draw out something beautiful, or pure, or new… this was beyond a box of circuits. She tossed and turned.
Mullard. The huge astronomical facility that could pick up signals from deep in space. Why would it have a stream of numbers it couldn’t make sense of? She thought of a storm somewhere, a huge sunspot interfering with radio waves, a massive cataclysm billions of kilometres away, entropy, many years ago, acting on something they could only sense the tiniest trace of now. The thought of it made her feel very small suddenly, and rather lonely: the concept of an entire galaxy, burning up, with no witnesses and nobody to care, except thousands of pages of slightly anomalous megahertz printout.
Eventually she gave up on sleep altogether and went to one of the windows to look out on the quiet rolling hills beyond. The evening was still warm, and there was a clear spring smell of turned earth and early green in the air. She threw on a huge, old fisherman’s jumper that had belonged to a man she had once known (and liked less than his jumper) laced up a pair of old Converse trainers but left on her old flannel pyjama bot
toms, and crept out quietly into the night.
The ground was damp with dew, but the air was fresh and sweet, softer than she was used to. The traffic noise was far away in the distance, but the bells of the ancient town chimed the half hour as she passed. The night porter stood up to check her out, but as soon as he realised she wasn’t an undergraduate, waved her past with an admonition to watch out for herself.
Three streets and she was at the edge of the hills, a full moon lighting up the world. There was nobody there at all, not even a late-night dog-walker or two. Feeling jittery, full of a strange, unnerving excitement that would not dissipate, she decided to walk it out and, under the bright light of the moon and stars, she marched onto the pathway off the road and up the low fen. The grass was wet brushing across her ankles; there was scuttling and scuffling from little paws in the undergrowth and, as she left the lights of the town behind, her eyes adjusted and the sky ahead of her was larger than ever as she gazed up, wondering at the endless sub-stratum commotion taking place in the vast silence of space.
She nearly tripped over the body lying on the hillside.
‘OH MY GOD!’ Connie yelled, coming to a sudden standstill, her hands fleeing to her mouth.
The figure uncoiled languorously, as if not entirely surprised to be tripped over in the middle of the night. Connie was about to jump backwards, when she realised who it was.
‘Bloody hell!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Luke was lying stretched out on his back, staring at the sky.
‘Luke?’
‘Hair,’ he said dreamily, as if half asleep, not turning his head. He had taken off his glasses, and again those large eyes were dark shadows in his face. Connie followed his gaze. He was staring intently at the clear sky, the stars overshadowed by the moonlight.
‘Is it wet down there?’ she said.
Luke wriggled.
‘Ish. Yes.’
‘Do you just like wet stuff?’
Luke didn’t answer.
‘What are you looking at?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer this either.
‘I just like looking at the sky,’ he said finally. ‘The motion over there by Regulus. And Alphard, and Hydra. It looks pink to me. Which do you like? Come and lie down.’
‘In the wet grass.’
‘Wet-ish.’
She looked at him for a moment. And although it was very unlike her, she lay down near, but not next, to him, not touching, following his gaze.
‘I don’t see any motion,’ she said. All she could see up there was black and navy blue and the bright white pinpricks of the brilliant stars. She started calculating their vectors in her head out of long habit, then stopped. ‘Or pink.’
‘It’s not really pink,’ he said. ‘Pink… ish. Except you know, I’m not entirely sure. I’m a bit colour-blind.’
‘Okay,’ said Connie. ‘Well, that explains it. You’re colour-blind?’
‘Well. Yes. I can’t see a lot of colour.’
‘Doesn’t it just mean you mix up a lot of colours?’ said Connie. ‘Like red and green?’
‘Not me,’ said Luke. ‘I can’t… I can’t see many at all.’
‘Except up there?’
He nodded.
‘Yes. I see more colours up there. I see… I see a lot up there. I find it soothing. Here, down here, everything is just rushing shadows. But up there, there’s space. I can see clearly. There’s room to fit everything in. And it moves at about the right speed, don’t you find?’
An aeroplane, destined for Stansted, sailed over their heads.
‘Well, some things do,’ he said. It was very quiet up on the hill, just the whisper of wind in the long grass; the occasional rustle of a field mouse going about its business; the gentle hooting of an owl.
‘And I can work there,’ he added, raising his hand with its graceful, long fingers connecting the dots. ‘The graph of it. It’s like, finally, a large enough canvas.’
‘Like a giant iPad,’ said Connie, watching as he traced patterns across the sky.
‘What’s that?’ he frowned.
She turned to look at him.
‘You’ve never heard of an iPad?’
‘Of course I have,’ he said swiftly. ‘They’re… awesome?’
Connie smiled.
‘Totally.’
They lay there, watching Saturn inch its way across the night sky. Connie wondered if he’d fallen asleep. She didn’t feel sleepy at all.
‘When I was little,’ she began. She hadn’t thought about this for years. ‘When I was very small I was in the car, with just my dad – I don’t know where the others were.’
Luke didn’t move, so she continued.
‘And I was kind of asleep against the window, then I woke up and I saw… I saw a UFO.’
He looked at her then.
‘Really?’
‘Yes! Well, no. Not REALLY. It was a huge, round shape, half the size of the sky, with lights twinkling all round it in a circle.’
‘And?’
‘And… it was amazing. I was kind of terrified and really excited all at once. This is it, I thought. They’re here. My dad… my dad took me to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind when I was little. And when we came out, he said to me, “You know, if aliens came for me, I would go straightaway. I would love that. I would walk straight into that space ship.” And I said, “What, without us?” and he looked a bit strange and said he would miss us a lot, but, you know. Aliens!
‘And I said, “Me too!”’
Luke smiled.
‘I take it that didn’t happen?’
Connie fell silent.
‘He did leave us,’ she said eventually. ‘But not for aliens. For some stupid woman who lived down the street. Mum never got over it. She’d much rather he’d have been kidnapped and painfully probed and experimented on.’
Luke blinked in the darkness.
‘I am sorry about that.’
‘It happens a lot,’ said Connie swiftly. She hated to dwell on the pain of those years; had dealt with it then by burying her head in her books and studying until she couldn’t hear the shouting and the fights any more. In mathematics, where the numbers did interesting things, but they were reliable. They behaved in comprehensible ways. 2x was always more than x, if x was a natural number. You could start from that, from the very basics, and end up anywhere you liked.
‘So, what was it?’ asked Luke eventually. Connie had lost her train of thought.
‘What… oh, the spaceship?’
‘The spaceship.’
‘It was the lights of the cars on the next hill,’ she said. ‘On the road round the hill. The hill was round and dark and the red lights were going one way and the yellow lights were going another way.’
‘Aha,’ said Luke. ‘Well, we’ve all done it.’
‘Mistaken some cars for a spaceship?’
‘Maybe not all of us.’
‘What if… I mean, what if,’ said Connie. ‘I mean, I’ve heard rumours about these secret tasks, but I never thought I’d be caught up in one.’
‘I doubt that’s our job,’ said Luke. ‘You have to remember how those scientists think. Disprove, disprove, disprove. They want us to come back and tell them it’s nothing.’
‘I suppose,’ said Connie.
‘If you think about it too much,’ said Luke. ‘It might get in the way.’
‘They can’t stop speculation.’
He looked at her. ‘From the looks of that little display of intimidation tonight, they can stop a lot of things.’
‘But… you know…’
Connie cast her hands to the sky.
‘What if… what if it was a message, from further away than you can imagine? On a different wavelength?’
She thought of the rows of numbers again.
‘What if it was a song?’
Luke looked at her.
‘You think an unimaginably faraway species in an unimaginably faraway univers
e, probably on a dimensional axis to us, and with goodness knows what kind of spatial relationships to us, nano or vast… you think they’d send us “Orinoco Flow”?’
Connie stared at him.
‘Seriously, that’s the first song that came to mind?’
‘It’s a pretty song,’ said Luke defiantly.
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