Gregory Benford - Timescape

“That scrambled part of the message? RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS and so on.”

“Correct. To lay out a grid you need to know how many lines to take on each axis. I tried a bunch of combinations that multiply out to 1537. All gave a mess, except a 29-by-53 grid. Laying the dashes out on that scheme gave a picture. And 29 and 53 are both prime numbers—the obvious choice, when you think about it. There is only that one way to break 1537 down into a product of primes.”

“Ummm. Very clever. And this is the picture?”

Saul handed Gordon a sheet of graph paper with a point filled in for each dash in the transmission. It showed a complex interweaving set of curves moving from right to left. Each curve was made of clusters of dots, arranged in a regular but complicated pattern. “What is it?” Gordon asked.

“I don’t know. All the practice problems Frank and I made up gave pictures showing solar systems, with one planet picked out—things like that. This one doesn’t look anything like that.”

Gordon tossed the drawing on his desk. “Then what use is it?”

“Well—hell! An immense amount of good, once we figure it out.”

“Well…”

“What’s the matter? You think this is wrong?”

“Saul, I know you’ve got a reputation for thinking about—what’s that Hermann Kahn calls it?—the unthinkable. But this—!”

“You think I’m making all this up?”

“Me? Me? Saul, I detected this message. I showed it to you . But your explanation—! Faster-than-light telegraph signals from another star. But the coordinates don’t quite fit! A picture coming out of the noise. But the picture makes no sense! Come on, Saul.”

Saul’s face reddened and he stepped back, hands on hips. “You’re blind, you know that? Blind.”

“Let’s say… skeptical.”

“Gordon, you’re not giving me a break.”

“Break? I admit you’ve got some sort of case. But until we understand that picture of yours, it doesn’t hold water.”

“Okay. O-kay,” Saul said dramatically, smacking a fist into his left palm. “I’ll find out what that drawing means. We’ll have to go to the whole academic community to solve the riddle.”

“What’s that mean?”

“We’ll have to go public.”

“Ask around?”

“Ask who? What specialty? Astrophysics? Biology? When you don’t know, you have to keep your mind open.”

“Yes… but…” Gordon suddenly remembered Ramsey. “Saul, there’s another message.”

“What?”

“I got it months ago. Here.” He rummaged through his desk drawers and found the transcript. “Try that on for size.”

Saul studied the long typed lines. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do L”

“You’re sure this is valid?”

“As sure as I am of what you’ve already deciphered.”

“Shit.” Saul collapsed into a chair. “This really confuses things.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

“Gordon, it makes no sense”

“Neither does your picture.”

“Look, maybe you’re getting conflicting messages. When you tune into different radio stations, you get music on one, sports on another, current events on a third. Maybe you’ve got a receiver here that just scoops up everything.”

“Um.”

Saul leaned forward in his chair and pressed his palms against his temples. Gordon realized the man was tired. He had probably stayed up all night working on the breakdown of the picture. He felt a sudden burst of sympathy for him. Saul was already known as a proponent of the interstellar communication idea, and a lot of astronomers thought he was too wild, too speculative, too young and impulsive. Well, so what—that didn’t mean he was wrong.

“Okay, Saul, I’ll accept the picture idea—provisionally. It can’t be an accident. So—what is it? We have to find out.” He told Saul about Ramsey. That merely complicated matters, but he felt Saul had a right to know.

“Gordon, I still think we’ve got something here.”

“So do I.”

“I think we ought to go public.”

“With the biochemistry, too? The first message?”

“No…” Saul thought. “No, just with this second message. It’s clear. It repeats itself for pages . How often did you get that first signal?”

“Once.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Then let’s forget it.”

“Why?”

“It might be a decoding error.”

Gordon remembered Lakin’s story about Lowell. “Well…”

“Look, I’ve got a lot more experience with these things than you do. I know what people will say. If you muddy the water around a subject, nobody jumps in.”

“We’d be withholding information.”

“Withholding, yes. But not forever. Just until we find out what the picture means.”

“I don’t like it.”

“We’ll give them only one problem at a time.” Saul raised a finger. “One problem. Later, we’ll tell the whole story.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Gordon, look. I think this is the way to do it. Will you take my advice?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take it, go public. I’m known. I’m a crazy guy who fools around with interstellar radio signals and all that stuff. A certified authority on a nonexistent subject. I can get the attention of the academic community.”

“Yeah, but…”

“One problem at a time, Gordon!”

“Well…”

“First, the picture. Later, the rest.”

“Well…” Gordon had a class coming up. Saul had a hypnotic quality about him, the ability to make notions seem plausible and even obvious. But, Gordon thought, a sow’s ear with a ribbon around it was still a sow’s ear. Still… “Okay. You get into the ring. I’m staying out.”

“Hey, thanks.” Suddenly Saul was shaking his head. “I appreciate that. I really do. It’s a great break.”

“Yeah,” Gordon said. But he felt no elation.

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite came on as Gordon and Penny were finishing dinner. She had made a soufflé and Gordon had uncorked a white Beaujolais; both were feeling quite flush. They moved into the living room to watch. Penny took off her blouse, revealing small well-shaped breasts with large nipples.

“How do you know it’ll be on?” she asked lazily.

“Saul called this afternoon. He did an interview in Boston this morning. The local CBS station did the work, but he said the national network picked it up. Maybe there isn’t much else going on.” He glanced around to be sure the curtains were drawn.

“Ummm. Looks that way.” There was one big story—the nuclear powered submarine Thresher had gone down in the Atlantic without a single cry for help. They had been on a test dive. The Navy said that probably a system failure created progressive flooding. The interference with electrical circuits caused loss of power and the sub plunged to deeper waters, finally imploding. There were 129 men aboard.

Other than this depressing news there was very little. A follow-up on the Mona Lisa exhibit which toured New York and Washington, D.C. A preview of the launch of Major L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., who was to be launched on a 22-orbit, two-day trip around the earth in Faith 7, the final flight of Project Mercury. A statement by the White House that aid to South Vietnam would continue and that the war might be won by the end of 1965 if the political crisis there did not significantly affect the military effort. Generals grinned at the camera, promising a firm effort by the ARVN and a short mop-up operation in the delta region. In New York, efforts to save Pennsylvania Station had failed, and the classic edifice began to fall to the wrecker’s ball to make way for the new Madison Square Garden. The Pan Am Building, dedicated a month earlier, seemed the wave of the urban-blighted future. On camera, a critic decried the fall of Perm Station and declared the Pan Am an architectural atrocity, contributing to congestion in an already crowded area. Gordon agreed. The critic closed with a wistful remark that meeting beneath the clock at the Biltmore hotel, just across the street from the Pan Am, wasn’t going to be much of a joy any more. Gordon laughed to himself without quite understanding why. His sympathies suddenly reversed. He had never met a girl at the Biltmore; that was the sort of empty WASP ritual open to Yalies and kids who identified with The Catcher in the Rye . That wasn’t his world and never had been. “If that’s the past, fuck it,” he muttered under his breath. Penny gave him a questioning glance but said nothing. He grunted impatiently. Maybe the wine was getting to him.