Gregory Benford - Timescape

“Yes, but that assumes everything’s steady.”

“Well, it is.”

“Who says? Suppose the noise comes in bursts?”

“Why should it?”

“Damn it!” Gordon slammed a fist down, sending the snapped pencil skittering off the table. “Try the idea on for size! Why is it every student wants things spelled out for him?”

“Well, okay.” Cooper earnestly knitted his forehead into a worried expression. Gordon could see the man was obviously too tired to do any real thinking. For that matter, so was he. They’d been hammering away at this nightmare problem for days, sleeping a minimal amount and going out for meals in greasy fast-food franchises. Hell, he hadn’t even got down to the beach to do any jogging. And Penny—Christ, he’d hardly caught a glimpse of her. She’d said something abrupt and feisty to him last night, just before he fell asleep, and it hadn’t registered with him until he was getting dressed, alone, this morning. So there was some patching-up to do there, when he got home. If he ever got home, he added, because he was damned if he’d give up on this puzzle until…

“Hey, try this,” Cooper said, jarring Gordon out of his musing. “Suppose we’re seeing a time-varying input here, the way you said it was, you know, days ago—when we started searching for outside noise sources. Our transcribing pen is moving at a constant rate across the paper, right?” Gordon nodded. “So these spikes here are spaced about a centimeter apart, and then two spaced half a centimeter. Then a one centimeter interval, three half-centimeters, and so on.”

Gordon suddenly saw what he was driving at, but he let Cooper finish.

“That’s the way the signal came in, spaced out in time . Not frequency, time.”

Gordon nodded. It was obvious, now that he stared at the wiggles and peaks of the recording pens. “Something coming in bursts, all across the frequency spectrum we’re studying.” He pursed his lips. “Bursts with long intervals between them, then some with shorter intervals.”

“Right.” Cooper nodded enthusiastically. “That’s it.”

“Short ones, long ones… Short, long, short, short. Like…”

“Like a goddamned code,” Cooper finished. Cooper wiped at his mouth and stared at the x-y recordings.

“Do you know Morse code?” Gordon asked him quietly. “I don’t.”

“Well, yeah. I did when I was a kid, anyway.”

“Let’s lay out these sheets, in the order I took the data.” Gordon stood up with renewed energy. He picked the broken pencil off the floor and inserted it in a pencil sharpener and started turning the handle. It made a raw, grinding noise.

When Isaac Lakin came into the nuclear resonance laboratory anyone, even a casual visitor, could tell it was his. Of course, the National Science Foundation paid for essentially all of it, except the war surplus electronics gear acquired from the Navy, and the University of California owned the immense pancake magnets under a Grantor’s Assignment, but in any useful sense of the term the laboratory belonged to Isaac Lakin. He had established his reputation at MIT in a decade of sound work, research occasionally flecked by the sparkle of real brilliance. From there he had gone to General Electric and Bell Labs, each step taking him higher. When the University of California began building a new campus around the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Lakin became one of their first “finds.” He had the contacts in Washington and brought a big chunk of money with him, money that translated into gear and lab space and slots for junior faculty. Gordon had been one of the first to fill those slots, but from the beginning he and Lakin had failed to hit it off. When Lakin came into Gordon’s lab he usually found something out of place, a snarl of wires that almost tripped him, a dewar poorly secured, something that soured his mood.

Lakin nodded to Cooper and murmured a hello to Gordon, his eyes scanning the lab. Gordon quickly led Lakin through a summary of their process of elimination. Lakin nodded, smiling faintly, as Cooper then detailed the weeks he had spent checking and rechecking the rig. As Cooper went on Lakin drifted away, thumbing a knob here, studying a circuit there.

“These leads are reversed,” he declared, holding up wiring with alligator clips attached.

“That unit we aren’t using anyway,” Gordon replied mildly. Lakin studied Cooper’s circuitry, made a remark about assemblying it better, and moved on. Cooper’s voice followed him around the large laboratory bay. To Cooper, describing an experiment was like field-stripping a rifle, each part in its place and as necessary as any other. He was good and he was careful, but he hadn’t the experience to go for the throat of a problem, Gordon saw, to give only the essentials. Well, that was why Cooper was a student and Lakin a full professor.

Lakin flipped a switch, studied the dancing face of an oscilloscope, and said, “Something’s out of alignment.”

Cooper scurried into action. He tracked down the snag, setting it right in a few moments. Lakin nodded in approval. Gordon felt a curious tightness in his chest ease, as though it had been himself being tested, not Cooper.

“Very well, then,” Lakin said finally. “Your results?”

Now it was Gordon’s turn to perform. He chalk-talked his way through their ideas, followed them up with the data displays. He gave Cooper credit for guessing there was a, coded message in the noise. He picked up a recorder sheet and showed it to Lakin, pointing out the spacings and how they were always close to either one centimeter or 0.5 centimeters, never anything else.

Lakin studied the jittery lines with their occasional sharp points, like towers jutting up through a fog-shrouded cityscape. Impassively he said, “Nonsense.”

Gordon paused. “I thought so, too, at first. Then we decoded the thing, assigning the 0.5 centimeter intervals as ‘short’ and one centimeter as ‘long’ in Morse code.”

“This is pointless. There is no physical effect which could produce data like these.” Lakin glanced around at Cooper, clearly exasperated.

“But look at a translation from the Morse,” Gordon said, scribbling on the blackboard. ENZYME INHIBITED B.

Lakin squinted at the letters. “This is from one sheet of recorder paper?” “Well, no. Three together.” “Where were the breaks?”

“ENZYM on the first, E INHIB on the second, ITED B on the third.”

“So you haven’t got a complete word at all.”

“Well, they are serial. I took them one after the other, with just a quick pause to change paper.”

“How long?”

“Oh… twenty seconds.”

“Time enough for several of your ‘letters’ to go by undetected.”

“Well, maybe. But the structure—”

“There is no structure here, merely guesswork.”

Gordon frowned. “The chances of getting a set of words out of random noise, arranged this way—”

“How do you space the words?” Lakin said. “Even in Morse de there’s an interval, to tell you where one word stops and another begins.”

“Doctor Lakin, that’s just what we’ve found. There are two-centimeter intervals on the recordings between each word. That fits—”

“I see.” Lakin took all this stoically. “Quite convenient. Are there other… messages?”

“Some,” Gordon said evenly. “They don’t make a great deal of sense.”

“I suspected as much.”

“Oh, there are words. ‘This’ and ‘saturate’—what are the odds against getting an eight-letter word like that, offset on each side with two-centimeter spacings?”

“Ummm,” Lakin said, shrugging. Gordon always had the feeling that at such moments Lakin had some expression in his native language, Hungarian, but couldn’t translate it into English. “I still believe it to be… nonsense. There is no physical effect such as this. Interference from outside, yes. I can believe that. But this, this James Bond Morse code—no.”