Gregory Benford - Timescape

“Sorry, Gordon, had to finish that—say, you look kinda worn out. This weather got you down, fella?”

Gordon shook his head and rose, following Ramsey to a side office. A slight giddiness swarmed through him. Must be the air in here , he thought. That, and the Santa Ana, and his shallow, momentary sleep of the night before.

Ramsey was already several sentences ahead of him before Gordon registered the fact. “What?” he said, his voice a croak from the dryness.

“I said, the clues were all there. I was just too blind to see them.”

“Clues?”

“At first I was just looking for preliminary data. You know, something to kick off a grant, get the funding agencies interested. Defense, I guess. But that’s the point, Gordon—this is bigger than DOD now. NSF should go for it.”

“Why?”

“It’s big , that’s why. That line, ‘enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host’—that’s the giveaway. I took a solution like the one that message described. You know, land runoff stuff, pesticides, some heavy metals—cadmium, nickel, mercury. Threw in some long-chain molecules, too. Had a grad student make them up. Lattitine chain, like the message said. Got a friend at DuPont to loan me some of their experimental long-chain samples.”

“Could you find the labeling numbers the message gave?”

Ramsey frowned. “Nope, that’s the puzzler. This buddy of mine says they don’t have anything’ called that. And Springfield claims they don’t have an AD45 pesticide, either. Your signal must’ve got messed up there.”

“So you couldn’t duplicate it.”

“Not exactly—but who needs exactly? What these long-chain babies are is versatile.”

“How can you be—”

“Look, I took the batches down to Scripps. Took Hussinger out to lunch, talked up the project. Got him to give me some sea water testing troughs. They’re first class—constant temperature and salinity, steady monitoring, the works. Lots of sunlight, too. And—” he paused, compressing a smile—“the whole damn thing came true. Every bit.”

“The diatom bloom part, you mean?”

“Sure, only that’s a later stage. Those long-chain bastards go like Poncho, I tell ya. That sea water started out ordinary, super-saturated with oxygen. After two months we started getting funny readings on the oxygen column. That’s a measurement of the oxygen budget in a vertical column of water, maybe thirty meters high. Then the plankton started to go. Just crapped out on us—dead, or funny new forms.”

“How?”

Ramsey shrugged. “Your message says ‘virus imprinting.’ Mumbo-jumbo, I think. What’s virus got to do with sea water?”

“What has a pesticide got to do with plankton?”

“Yeah, good point. We don’t know. That other phrase you had—’can then convert plankton neuro jacket into its own chemical form using ambient oxygen content until level falls to values fatal to most of the higher food chain’—sounds like somebody knows, right?”

“Apparently.”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s smack on what we found.”

“It scavenges the oxygen?”

“And how.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Spreads like a sonofabitch, too. That mixture turns the plankton into itself , seems like. Makes some pretty lethal side products, too—chlorinated benzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, all kinds of crap. Have a squint at this.”

A photograph, produced with a flourish from a folder. A lean fish on a concrete slab, eyes glazed. Its lips bulged, green and laced with filaments of blue. A pale sore beneath the gills.

“Lip cancers, assymetries, tumors—Hussinger turned white when he saw what it did to his sample stock. See, he usually doesn’t worry about pathogens getting into the troughs. Sea water is cold and salty. It kills disease-carriers, all except some…”

Gordon noticed the pause. “Except what?”

“Except some viruses, Hussinger said.”

“Uh huh. ‘Virus imprinting.’ And these fish—”

“Hussinger isolated my troughs and stopped it. All my sample fish died.”

The two men stared at each other. “I wonder who’s using it down in the Amazon,” Ramsey said softly.

“Russians?” The possibility now seemed quite real to Gordon.

“Where’s the strategic advantage?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of accident.”

“I dunno… You still don’t know why you’re getting this over your NMR rig?”

“No.”

“That Saul Shriffer crap—”

Gordon waved it away. “Not my idea. Forget it.”

“We can’t forget this.” Ramsey held up the fish photo.

“No, we can’t.”

“Hussinger wants to publish right away.”

“Go ahead.”

“You sure this isn’t a DOD thing you’re working on?”

“No, look—that was your idea.”

“You didn’t knock it down.”

“Let’s say I didn’t want to expose my source. You can see what happened when Shriffer got hold of it.”

“Yeah.” Ramsey peered at him, a distant and assessing look. “You’re pretty sly.”

Gordon thought this was unfair. “You brought up the DOD angle. I said nothing.”

“Okay, okay Tricky, though.”

Gordon wondered if Ramsey was thinking to himself, Shifty Jew . But he caught himself as he thought it. Christ, what paranoia. He was getting to sound like his mother, always sure the goyim were out to get you.

“Sorry about that,” Gordon said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t, well…”

“Hey, that’s okay. No big deal. Hell, you put me onto a fantastic thing. Really important.”

Ramsey tapped the photograph. Both men stared at it, reflecting. A silence fell between them. The fish’s lips were swollen balloons, the colors horribly out of place. In the quiet Gordon heard the lab outside the small office. The regular chugging and ticking went on unmindful of the two men, rhythms and forces, voices. Nucleic acids sought each other in the capillaries of glass. An acid smell cut the air. Enameled light descended. Ticktock ticktock .

Saul Shriffer gazed out from the cover of Life with a casual self-confidence, arm draped over a Palomar telescope mount. Inside, the story was titled BATTLING EXOBIOLOGIST. There were pictures of Saul peering at a photograph of Venus, Saul inspecting a model of Mars, Saul at the control panel of the Green Bank radio telescope. One paragraph dealt with the NMR message. Beside the big magnets stood Saul, with Gordon in the background. Gordon was looking into the space between the magnet poles, apparently doing nothing. Saul’s hand hovered near some wiring, about to fix it. The NMR signals were described as “controversial” and “strongly doubted by most astronomers.” Saul was quoted: “You take some chances in this field. Sometimes you lose. Them’s the breaks.”

“Gordon, your name is in here once . That’s all,” Penny said.

“The article’s about Saul, remember.”

“But that’s why he’s in here. He’s riding on your…”

Mocking: “My success.”

“Well, no, but…”

Gordon tossed the drawing on Ramsey’s desk. “Did I give you a copy of this?”

Ramsey picked it up and wrinkled his brow. “No. What is it?”

“Another part of the signal.”

“Oh yeah, I remember. It was on TV.”

“Right. Shriffer showed it.”

Ramsey studied the interweaving curves. “Y’know, I didn’t think anything of this at the time. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it looks like some sort of molecular chain to me. These dots…”