Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Out on the desert, lights were moving. That would be Brackett fine-tuning the Array for Orrin Hopkins, who was then beginning the observations that would lead, several years later, to new departures in pulsar theory. I envied Hopkins: he was short, round, bald, a man unsure of himself, whose occasionally brilliant insights were explained with giggles. He was a ridiculous figure; yet he bore the stamp of genius. And people would remember his ideas long after the residence hall named for me at Carrollton had crumbled.

  If I had not long since recognized my own perimeters and conceded any hope of my immortality (at least of this sort), I certainly did so when I accepted the director’s position at Sandage. Administration pays better than being an active physicist, but it is death to ambition.

  And a Jesuit doesn’t even get that advantage.

  In those days, the Array was still modest: forty parabolic antennas, each thirty-six meters across. They were on tracks, of course, independently movable, forming a truncated cross. They had, for two decades, been the heart of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Now, with the Project abandoned, they were being employed for more useful, if mundane, purposes.

  Even that relatively unsophisticated system was good: as Hutching Chaney once remarked, the Array could pick up the cough of an automobile ignition on the moon.

  I circled the desk and fell into the uncomfortable wooden chair we’d inherited from the outgoing regime. The packet was sealed down with tape that had become brittle and loose around the edges. I tore it open.

  It was a quarter past ten. I’d worked through my dinner and the evening hours, bored, drinking coffee, debating the wisdom in coming out here from JPL. The increase in responsibility was a good career move; but I knew now that Harry Cooke would never lay his hands on a new particle.

  I was committed for two years at Sandage: two years of working out schedules and worrying about insurance; two years of dividing meals between the installation’s sterile cafeteria, and Jimmy’s Amoco on Route 85. Then, if it all went well, I could expect another move up, perhaps to Georgetown.

  I’d have traded it all for Hopkins’s future.

  I shook out six magnetic discs onto the desk. They were in individual sleeves, of the type that many installations had once used to record electromagnetic radiation. The discs were numbered and dated over a three-day period in 1991, two years earlier than the date on the envelope.

  Each was marked “Procyon.”

  In back, Hopkins and two associates were hunched over monitors. Brackett, having finished his job, was at his desk reading.

  I was pleased to discover that the discs were compatible to the Mark VIs. I inserted one, tied in a vocorder to get a hard copy, and went over to join the Hopkins group while the thing ran. They were talking about plasma. I listened for a time, got lost, noted that everyone around me (save the grinning little round man) also got lost, and strolled back to my computer.

  The trace drew its green-and-white pictures smoothly on the Mark VI display, and pages of hard copy clicked out of the vocorder. Something in the needle geometry scattered across the recording paper drew my attention. Like an elusive name, it drifted just beyond my reach.

  Beneath a plate of the Andromeda Galaxy, a coffee pot simmered. I could hear the distant drone of a plane, probably out of Luke Air Force Base. Behind me, Hopkins and his men were laughing at something.

  There were patterns in the recording.

  They materialized slowly, identical clusters of impulses: the signals were artificial.

  Procyon.

  The laughter, the plane, the coffee pot, a radio that had been left on somewhere: everything ratched down to a possibility.

  More likely Phoenix, I thought.

  Frank Myers had been SETI Director since Ed Dickinson’s death twelve years before. I reached him next morning in San Francisco.

  “No,” he said without hesitation. “Someone’s idea of a joke, Harry.”

  “It was in your safe, Frank.”

  “That damned safe’s been there forty years. Might be anything in it. Except messages from Mars … .”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  It had been a long night: I’d taken the hard copy to bed with me and, by 5 AM, had identified more than forty distinct pulse patterns. The signal appeared to be continuous: that is, it had been an ongoing transmission with no indication of beginning or end, but only irregular breaches of the type that would result from atmospherics and, of course, the long periods during which the target would have been below the horizon.

  It was clearly a reflected terrestrial transmission: radio waves bounce around considerably. But why seal the error two years later and put it in the safe?

  Procyon is a yellow-white class F3 binary, absolute magnitude 2.8, once worshipped in Babylonia and Egypt. (What hasn’t been worshipped in Egypt?) Distance from Earth: 11.3 light-years.

  In the outer office, Beth Cooper typed, closed cabinet drawers, spoke with visitors.

  The obvious course of action was to use the Array. Listen to Procyon at 40 gigahertz, or all across the spectrum for that matter, and find out if it was, indeed, saying something.

  On the intercom, I asked Beth when we had open time on the System. “Nothing for seventeen months,” she said crisply.

  That was no surprise. The facility had booked quickly when its resources were made available to the astronomical community on more than the limited basis that had prevailed for twenty years. Anyone wishing to use the radiotelescope had to plan far in advance. How could I get hold of the Array for a couple hours?

  “Beth, would you come in a moment, please?”

  Beth Cooper had come to Sandage from San Augustin with SETI during the big move twenty years before. She’d been secretary to three directors: Hutching Chaney, who had built Sandage; his longtime friend Ed Dickinson; and finally, after Dickinson’s death, Frank Myers, a young man on the move, who’d stayed too long with the Project, and who’d been reportedly happy to see it strangled. In any case, Myers had contributed to its demise by his failure to defend it.

  I’d felt he was right, of course, though for the wrong reason. It had been painful to see the magnificent telescope at Sandage denied, by and large, to the scientific community while its grotesque hunt for the little Green Man signal went on. I think there were few of us not happy to see it end.

  Beth had expected to lose her job. But she knew her way around the facility, had a talent for massaging egos, and could spell. A devout Lutheran, she had adapted cautiously to working for a priest and, oddly, seemed to have taken offense that I did not routinely walk around with a Roman collar.

  I asked one or two questions about the billing methods of the local utilities, and then commented, as casually as I could manage, that it was unfortunate the Project had not succeeded.

  Beth looked more like a New York librarian than a secretary at a desert installation. Her hair was silver-gray. She wore steel-rimmed glasses on a long, silver chain. She was moderately heavy; but her carriage and her diction were impeccable, imbuing her with the quality that stage people call presence.

  Her eyes narrowed to hard black beads at my remark. “Dr. Dickinson said any number of times that none of us would live to see results. Everyone attached to the program, even the janitors, knew that.” She wasn’t a woman given to shrugs, but the sudden flick in those dark eyes matched the effect. “I’m glad he didn’t live to see it terminated.”

  That was followed by an uncomfortable silence. “I don’t blame you, Doctor,” she said at length, referring to my public position that the facility was being underutilized.

  I dropped my eyes, and tried to smile reassuringly. It must have been ludicrious: her severe features softened. I showed her the envelope.

  “Do you recognize the writing?”

  She barely glanced at it. “It’s Dr. Dickinson’s.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t think Dickinson came to the Project until Hutch Chaney’s retirement. That was ’93, wasn’t it?”
>
  “He took over as Director then. But he was an operating technician under Dr. Chaney for, oh, ten or twelve years before that.” Her eyes glowed when she spoke of Dickinson.

  “I never met him,” I said.

  “He was a fine man.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, her features pale. “If we hadn’t lost him, we might not have lost the Project.”

  “If it matters,” I added gently.

  “If it matters,” she confirmed.

  She was right about Dickinson: he was articulate, a persuasive speaker, author of books on various subjects, and utterly dedicated to SETI. He might well have kept the project afloat despite the cessation of federal funds and an increasing clamor among his colleagues for more time at the facility. But Dickinson was twelve years dead now: he’d returned to Massachusetts at Christmas, as was his custom. After a snowstorm, he’d gone out to help shovel a neighbor’s driveway and his heart had failed.

  I’d been in the East myself at the time, at Georgetown. And I can still recall my sense of a genius who had died too soon. He had possessed a vast talent, but no discipline; he had churned through his career hurling sparks in all directions. But somehow everything he touched, like SETI, had come to no fulfillment.

  “Beth, was there ever a time they thought they had an LGM?”

  “The Little Green Man Signal?” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. They were always picking up echoes and things. But nothing ever came close. Either it was KCOX in Phoenix, or some Japanese trawler in the middle of the Pacific.”

  “Never anything that didn’t fit those categories?”

  One eyebrow rose slightly. “Never anything they could prove. If they couldn’t pin it down, they went back later and tried to find it again. One way or another, they eliminated everything.” Or, she was thinking, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.

  Beth’s comments implied that suspect signals had been automatically stored. Grateful that I had not yet got around to purging obsolete data, I discovered that was indeed the case, and ran a search covering the entire time period back to the Procyon reception in 1991, looking for a similar signal.

  I got a surprise.

  There was no match. There was also no record of the Procyon reception itself.

  That meant, presumably, it had been accounted for, and discarded.

  Then why, two years later, had the recordings been sealed and placed in the safe? Surely no explanation would have taken that long.

  SETI had assumed that any LGM signal would be a deliberate attempt to communicate, that an effort would therefore be made by the originator to create intelligibility, and that the logical way to do that was to employ a set of symbols representing universal constants: the atomic weight of hydrogen, perhaps, or the value of pi.

  But the move to Sandage had also been a move to more sophisticated, and considerably more sensitive, equipment. The possibility developed that the Project would pick up a slopover signal, a transmission of alien origin, but intended only for local receivers. Traffic of that nature could be immeasurably difficult to interpret.

  If the packet in the safe was anything at all, it was surely of this latter type. Forty gigahertz is not an ideal frequency for interstellar communication. Moreover it was ongoing, formless, no numbered parts, nothing to assist translation.

  I set the computer working on the text, using SETI’s own language analysis program. Then I instructed Brackett to call me if anything developed, had dinner at Jimmy’s, and went home. I was left undisturbed.

  There was no evidence of structure in the text. In English, one can expect to find a ‘U’ after a ‘Q’, or a vowel after a cluster of consonants. The aspirate is seldom doubled, nothing is ever tripled, and so on. But in the Procyon transmission, everything seemed utterly random.

  The computer counted sixty-one distinct pulse patterns, which was to say, sixty-one characters. None recurred at sufficient intervals to be a space. And the frequency count was flat: there was no quantitative difference in use from one character to another. All appeared approximately the same number of times. If it was a language, it was a language with no vowels.

  And certainly too many letters.

  I called Wes Phillips, who was then the only linguist I knew.

  Was it possible for a language to be structured in such a way?

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Unless you’re talking about some sort of construct. Even then …” He paused. “How many characters did you say?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “Harry, I can give you a whole series of reasons in maybe six different disciplines why languages need high and low frequency letters. To have a flat ‘curve,’ a language would have to be deliberately designed that way, and it would have to be non-oral. But what practical value would it have? Why bother?

  “One other thing,” he said. “Sixty-one letters seems a trifle much. If these people actually require that many characters to communicate, I suspect they’re going to be doing it with drums.”

  Ed Dickinson had been an enigma. During the series of superpower confrontations near the close of the century, he’d earned an international reputation as a diplomat, and as an eloquent defender of reason and restraint. Everyone agreed that he had a mind of the first rank. Yet, in his chosen field, he accomplished little. And he’d gone to work for the Project, historically only a stepping-stone to serious effort. But he’d stayed.

  Why?

  Hutching Chaney was a different matter. A retired naval officer, he’d indulged in physics almost as a sideline. His political connections had been instrumental in getting Sandage built; and his assignment to head it was rumored to have been a reward for his services during the undeclared Soviet naval war of ’87—’88.

  He possessed a plodding sort of competence. He was fully capable of grasping, and visualizing, extreme complexity. But he lacked insight and imagination, the ability to draw the subtle inference.

  After his retirement from Sandage, Chaney had gone to an emeritus position at MIT, which he’d held for five years.

  He was a big man, more truck driver than physicist. Despite advancing age—he was then in his 70s—and his bulk, he spoke and moved with energy. His hair was full and black. His light gray eyes suggested the shrewdness of a professional politician; and he possessed the confident congeniality of a man who had never failed at anything.

  We were in his home in Somerville, Massachusetts, a stone and glass house atop sweeping lawns. It was not an establishment that a retired physicist would be expected to inhabit: Chaney’s moneyed background was evident.

  He clapped a big hand on my shoulder and pulled me through one of those stiff, expensive living rooms that no one ever wants to sit in, into a paneled leather-upholstered compartment at the rear of the house. “Martha,” he said to someone I couldn’t see, “would you bring us some port?” He looked at me for acquiescence.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s been a long time, Hutch.”

  Books lined the walls: mostly technical, some on naval engineering, a few military and naval histories. An articulated steel gray model of the Lance dominated the fireplace shelf. That was the deadly hydrofoil which, built at Chaney’s urging, had been launched against the Soviets in vast numbers, and had swept them from the seas.

  “The Church is infiltrating everywhere,” he said. “How are things at Sandage, Harry?”

  I described some of the work then in progress. He listened with interest.

  A young woman arrived with a bottle, two glasses, and a plate of cheese. “Martha comes in three times a week,” Chaney said after she’d left. He smiled, winked, dipped a stick of cheese in some mustard, and bit it neatly in half. “You needn’t worry, Harry. I’m not capable of getting into trouble anymore. What brings you to Massachusetts?”

  I extracted the vocordings from my briefcase and handed them across to him. I watched patiently as he leafed through the thick sheaf of paper, and saw with satisfaction his change of expression.

  “
You’re kidding, Harry,” he said. “Somebody really found one? When’d it happen?”

  “Twenty years ago,” I said, passing him the envelope and the original discs.

  He turned them over in his hands. “Then there’s a mistake somewhere.”

  “It was in the safe,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t much matter where it was. Nothing like this ever happened.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Damned if I have any idea.”

  We sat not talking while Chaney continued to flip pages, grunting. He seemed to have forgotten his wine. “You run this yourself?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Hell of a lot of trouble for somebody to go to for a joke. Were the computers able to read any of it? No? That’s because it’s gibberish.” He stared at the envelope. “But it is Ed’s handwriting.”

  “Would Dickinson have any reason to keep such a thing quiet?”

  “Ed? No: Dickinson least of all. No one worked harder for a success. He wanted it so badly he invested his life in the Project.”

  “But could he, physically, have done this? Could he have picked up the LGM? Was he good enough with the computers to cover his tracks?”

  “This is pointless. Yes, he could have done it. And you could walk through Braintree without your pants.”

  A light breeze was coming through a side window, billowing the curtains. It was cool and pleasant, unusual for Massachusetts in August. Some kids were playing halfball out on the street.

  “Forty megahertz,” he said. “Sounds like a satellite transmission.”

  “That wouldn’t have taken two years to figure out, would it? Why keep the discs?”

  “Why not?” he said. “I expect if you go down into the storeroom you’ll find all kinds of relics.”

  Outside, there was a sound like distant thunder, exploding suddenly into an earsplitting screech. A stripped-down T-Bolt skidded by, scattering the ballplayers, and then accelerated. It took the corner stop sign at about 45. The game resumed, as though nothing had happened.