“You seem quite familiar with your dezhurnaya already,” said Sasha.
He still hadn’t exchanged a single word with the old lady on his floor, other than the obligatory greetings.
“You should talk to people more, Sasha. Then they’ll tell you things. That’s really useful here.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His mother always said that, too. But he got along fine without people. And it was more fun figuring things out for himself.
It took 15 minutes for them to reach the intersection where Lavrentyev Prospekt joined the Morskoy Prospekt. From that point on they were walking directly toward the vast Ob Sea, although they wouldn’t see it in the dark.
“How much farther?” asked Yuri.
“I’d say about another quarter of an hour,” said Katya.
They trooped in silence through the snowy landscape. The balmy wind heralded a change. Those small, white mounds between their path and the ski trail—were those plants breaking through the snow? Sasha imagined he saw thousands of flowers lifting their heads, even though the mounds were more likely to be tree stumps.
“You can sit here,” said the large and blonde waitress. She wore her hair in a bun tied with a ribbon and was looking at them sternly.
“Not over there?” asked Katya. “There’s a—”
“That’s reserved.”
“And there?” Katya pointed to a table against the dark-paneled side wall. All the tables were set, but the whole restaurant was empty.
“Also reserved. Only here is free, where I showed you.”
Katya rolled her eyes and sat at the table for four, with a view of the exit. Sasha sat on her right, Yuri on her left. The waitress left without a word.
“Your dezhurnaya made a great recommendation,” said Sasha.
“She also said no one comes here on Monday nights. If they’re out during the week, then it’s at a friend’s.”
The waitress returned a few minutes later with three folders bound in brown imitation leather and gave them one each without saying a word. Inside the folders were typewritten, slightly dog-eared sheets listing about a dozen different dishes.
“I’d like the roast lamb please,” Sasha said quickly, before the waitress left again.
“We don’t have that. We only have lamb in June.”
“What about the fish?”
“Have you seen the reservoir? At least a meter of ice—where am I supposed to get fish from?”
Well, there are a few ice fishermen, he could have said, but decided to drop it. He knew how it went. Why had he even thought it might be different in Akademgorodok? The list showed what there could be—if the raw ingredients were available.
“So what do you have?” he asked.
“Roast beef and ground beef steak.”
Ah, they were probably both from the deep freeze. Sasha wondered, how good would the beef be around here? If it was as tough as he suspected, it was better to leave the chewing to the meat grinder. “Ground for me,” he said.
“Me, too,” said Katya.
“I’d like the roast beef,” said Yuri.
“Oh, come now, comrades, are you going to make Kostya work twice as hard in the kitchen? See how empty it is. It’s not worth it, just for your—”
“Fair enough, well, I’ll have the ground beef, too, for Kostya’s sake. Thank him for us.”
“Oh, and we don’t have beans, either. It’s already mid-April and we’ve run out of frozen ones. I have sauerkraut or pickled gherkins as a side.”
“Sauerkraut,” said Yuri.
“Sauerkraut for everyone?”
Katya and Sasha nodded.
“But you have potatoes?” asked Sasha.
“Yes, comrade, we always store a large supply of those every year. You’re obviously not from here, or you’d know that wasn’t a sure thing. Storing potatoes in the cold so that they don’t freeze is an art that can only be mastered on a large scale by the restaurant in the House of Scholars.” The waitress seemed quite proud of this achievement.
“What’s your secret?” asked Katya.
“The steam line for the two research institutes runs directly under our cellar. It’s not especially well-insulated, and keeps everything from freezing in winter.”
“That’s lucky.”
The waitress nodded and marched off to the kitchen, where Kostya must now be at work. Hopefully, because Sasha was hungry.
“They probably removed the insulation on the line themselves,” said Yuri. “That’s what I’d do, anyway.”
“About the algorithms...” said Sasha.
He waited to see how Katya would react. He was expecting she wouldn’t want to talk shop here, but she didn’t object.
“Did you find something?” asked Yuri.
“There are a couple of possible approaches,” explained Sasha. “The first problem is differentiating between incidental deviations—measurement errors—and structural deviations, that is, the signal that we’re searching for. To do this, for example, you can overlay evenly-spaced intervals across the data and use them to calculate average values. The next time through you change the interval size. You repeat that a few different times.”
“That’s easy,” said Yuri. “If the interval is smaller than sixty-four kilobytes, it’ll be really quick.”
“The hard drive problem, I know,” said Sasha. “The second step is more complicated. Specifically, I looked at what the chemists and physicists are doing. They establish a theory, and then search for patterns in the data that fit the theory. That works because they already know something about their research subject.”
“But we don’t know anything,” said Yuri.
“That’s not quite true,” Katya corrected him. “We know it’s the cosmic background radiation. The pattern we’re looking for must have an origin. It was imprinted on the background at some point.”
“Who could have done that?” asked Yuri.
“Not who, what. I’m not assuming we’re dealing with a code typed out by some intelligent being,” said Katya.
“But in my initial analyses of the Relikt data—”
“I know, Sasha. You postulated that it contained information.”
“Measured, not postulated.”
“You didn’t measure. You applied various mathematical processes to the data to show that it wasn’t just static. Anything that makes order out of chaos is of course information, in the broader sense of the word. But that’s a long way off being text or code that we might be able to read. We can certainly learn something from the patterns, but we shouldn’t assume it’s a blueprint for secret weapons just because we can’t think of another explanation.”
“When I talked about my idea a few weeks ago in Tyuratam, you supported me, Katya.”
“I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible. But we have to proceed scientifically. First we check the more likely sources, and then the crazy ones.”
“You didn’t say back then that you thought it was insane.”
“That would have been stupid. You saw how excited the colonel general got over it. He’d never have made the flight to Salyut 7 or the work here on the mainframe possible for us if we’d told him it was probably just a naturally-occurring pattern.”
Sasha slumped. Katya had lied through her teeth because she saw an advantage for herself. Could he blame her? They weren’t together back then. Did that have anything to do with it? Would it be better to keep his professional and private lives separate?
“So what can I expect from these patterns?” Yuri asked.
Sasha looked at him. Was he trying to distract them from their quarrel? But his colleague was looking at them with genuine interest.
“It’s quite simple,” explained Katya. “If you sit on a ridged chair with a naked backside, it imprints a pattern on your butt cheeks. Then you come to us in the next room, where we inspect your backside and try to figure out the source of the pattern. All we can see is the pattern, but we’re really trying to find the chair. That exam
ple neatly illustrates how difficult it is. To determine the exact structure of the source—that is, the chair—by looking at a pattern of ridges is impossible. First we need a theory that the chair could be the source. Then we can check against our data whether the chair is capable of creating exactly the pattern that we’ve measured.”
“Do we have enough models for that?” asked Sasha. “As a mathematician, I’m not very familiar with the current state of cosmology.”
“I am,” said Katya. “I think first of all we should check whether our pattern has anything to do with inflation theory.”
“Inflation? The gold standard of capitalism?” asked Yuri.
“No. It’s quite a new theory,” said Katya. “When the universe was new, there may have been a phase of expansion faster than the speed of light. This inflation theory would explain many of the current properties of the universe, for example, that there are no longer any monopoles—that is, magnets with just a north or a south pole, not both. Alexei Starobinsky came up with the theory in 1979 in Moscow. Shortly after that an American, Alan Guth, published a similar theory. The name came from him.”
“But it hasn’t been proven?” asked Yuri.
“No. The main problem is that so far no one’s been able to demonstrate the cause of this inflation. Starobinsky and Guth both assume different causes. So we may be able to find out which of them is right.”
“Well, hopefully it’s our Russian colleague,” said Yuri.
“We’ll see,” Katya added.
“But what about the weapon my father’s hoping for?”
Katya sniffed. “He’s a soldier and all he’s sees are potential weapons everywhere.”
“But he’s paying for all this,” said Sasha.
Katya shook her head. “The Soviet State is paying. So, us. Fine, he’s organizing it all. That’s why we should let him fantasize a little longer. If we can arbitrate the disagreement between Starobinsky and Guth, it would be a smooth road to a Nobel Prize.”
She put her hand on his knee. It was nice. He stroked her hand.
“You already suspected all of this back at Tyuratam,” he said. “That’s why you persuaded him and me to search for information in the background radiation.”
Katya shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe. I thought it would be a really interesting project. And in the end, you got to fly into space, even if you don’t get to enjoy the fame associated with it.”
Fortunately, the food came before they could argue again. It looked surprisingly good. The ground beef was well browned on both sides but light pink in the middle, and the outside had been lightly peppered. The potatoes were large and firm. The sauerkraut lived up to its name. Sasha liked its flavor—it made the inside of his mouth contract. If you put a piece of chalk on it, it would decompose, foaming, into carbon dioxide and calcium acetate. Even the gravy was well made—it definitely wasn’t from a can. If Kostya had every possible ingredient at his disposal, he could probably conjure up masterful menus. The chef must be extremely frustrated.
They toasted with glasses of water, which the waitress had placed on the table in an old-fashioned carafe.
“To a successful project,” said Yuri.
“To the Nobel Prize,” said Katya, laughing.
“To us,” said Sasha.
April 18, 1984, Akademgorodok
USER 419997
The bright characters appeared haltingly on the dark background. Sasha looked for the key with the caret symbol that looked like a roof, to confirm the input line. The keyboard didn’t have Cyrillic letters, only English ones. That was because the input terminal wasn’t developed in the Soviet Union like the BESM-6, but had been imported from Hungary.
At least he didn’t have to create punch cards first, which had been the norm a few years ago. The punch card reader stood next to Yuri, who would rather have used that because he didn’t trust the modern hard disk storage units.
“You can’t imagine how close the head is to the magnetic layer,” he said. “It only needs to be bumped and it’ll touch it and scratch the whole plate.”
TIME 60
They’d agreed not to use the main processor for more than 60 seconds for these attempts. Where was that roof symbol again? Sasha’s fingers hovered over the tall keys. He couldn’t press them as hard as he was used to doing on his typewriter at the old institute in Moscow, or they bounced and then multiple characters would appear on the screen.
EE
The preparations were complete. Now came the actual program code. Sasha entered what he’d jotted down on a piece of paper in his room.
PROGRAM ANALYSIS
IMPLICIT NONE
REAL::A,B,C
INTEGER:I
No, he needed two number variables. Sasha added a ‘J,’ which wasn’t in his notes. His gaze darted between paper and screen. He should mount a paper holder next to the terminal. He looked a little jealously over at Katya who’d fashioned one out of a couple of stiff pieces of wire. But then she knew the BESM-6 better than he did. The program he was typing in was going to be used to analyze the data. Katya, on the other hand, was programming the model that his program would then apply to the data.
The process worked like a drill with replaceable bits. He created the machine and Katya was responsible for the bits. So that they could understand the nature of the measurement data, they needed a functioning machine and the right bit—i.e. the right model.
END PROGRAM ANALYSIS
The program itself only needed to be a few lines. The actual work was done by the various subprograms.
LOADER MODEL FUNCTION
Next he had to call up the model Katya had created from the memory. That was where they ran into their first problem, because the data, the model, and the program had to share the main memory. Sasha typed in the program he’d designed, line by line. What had he called the second number variable? Probably ‘J.’ But he couldn’t be sure, because the screen only showed 16 lines and had long since scrolled past it. It must have been J.
*EXECUTE
*END FILE
``````
EKONEC
Konyets, the end. Hopefully he hadn’t mistyped anything! Someone needed to invent a system that immediately reported errors. But for now he could only hope. Thousands of transistors were now receiving and sending electrical signals. Electronic gates were opening and closing. Trillions of electrons were flowing along the paths predetermined by his program and Katya’s model to deliver results within the given timeframe.
Error. The program hadn’t even needed 60 seconds. He’d mistyped something. The card puncher was running on Yuri’s desk. Fortunately he’d instructed the computer to spit out all his input on paper. So he wouldn’t have to retype everything—just the lines with errors.
Sasha fetched the stack of cards and went through them one at a time. Ah, he’d declared a false variable.
*EXECUTE
Error.
The loop in the subroutine took forever to run. The variable was the right type now—which was why he was only seeing it now.
*EXECUTE
Error.
Ah, the formula in line 189 needed two extra brackets.
*EXECUTE
Error.
In the loop in line 263, the program had apparently divided by zero. Why? He went through the relevant selection. Of course, he’d entered the wrong type of variable.
*EXECUTE
Error.
This couldn’t be happening! It was lucky he didn’t have to work as a programmer forever. Those guys really deserved his admiration. It must have taken years to program the automatic coupling of the Soyuz spaceships to the Salyut stations. And errors like the ones that kept happening to him would be deadly in space.
*EXECUTE
Sasha looked at his watch. It was almost time to call it a day. The error message was taking longer to appear this time! Then the cursor appeared on the screen again. It blinked harmlessly in front of him. No error message!
Sasha jumpe
d up. The screen started filling with zeroes. Zero was the ideal result—it showed the deviation between the model and the measured data. No deviation meant the model was correct, although up to now he’d only been working with a dummy model and dummy data, so deviations weren’t expected.
“Katya? How far along are you with the first model?” he asked.
“You’ll have it tomorrow.”
“Then let’s call it a day. We could cook something together in the hostel.”
They’d hardly seen each other privately in the last two days. He missed her.
“If the model’s going to be finished tomorrow, I’ll need at least till midnight,” said Katya. “It’s a priority now. Sorry.”
Sasha sat back down. Zeroes were still filing across the screen. He pressed the cancel key—he’d had enough of programming for today. “Okay, then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Yuri.
“Good night you two,” said Katya. “Please turn off the main light. Wait, Sasha, come here for a minute.”
He stood up and went over to her. Katya put her arms around his neck and kissed him.
He could still hear the sound of Katya’s typing when they reached the entrance to the basement, and he could taste the moisture from her lips almost until he got to the hostel.
April 19, 1984, Akademgorodok
They found Katya on the hard floor of the computer room. She was lying in a strangely twisted position on her jacket.
Sasha knelt beside her. “She’s just sleeping,” he said, kissing her gently on the forehead.
“What did you expect?” asked Yuri.
Katya opened her eyes, flaring her nostrils in disgust and turning her head to the side.
“Man, what’s with your breath?”
“There was only hard bread and pickled vegetables at the hostel, and that was only made edible by downing a whole lot of vodka,” said Sasha.
The Death of the Universe: Rebirth: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 3) Page 17