Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Kristi went to the memorial service, and said a few words trying to explain what Greg had meant to her, both professionally and as a friend. Then she’d choked up, as several people had before her. She listened to the minister say how Greg was with God now, and in better hands. He was alive and well in a better place than this. She wished she could believe it.

When it was over, she flew back to Pasadena, where she was a junior assistant professor at Caltech. She resumed work, and did her best to forget Clyde Tombaugh.

But it didn’t take.

Tombaugh had been born in Illinois to a family of farmers. Despite a limited formal education, he developed a fascination for telescopes at an early age. But he didn’t think highly of the telescope he’d gotten at Sears. So he’d built his own. He eventually put together his own reflector and took it to Mt. Lowell in Arizona. The observatory director was looking for an amateur astronomer to try to find Percival Lowell’s Planet X. Tombaugh hunted through thousands of photographic plates, comparing the positions of millions of celestial objects on successive nights, looking for something that moved. Looking for Pluto. On February 18, 1930, he found it.

She put a picture of Tombaugh on her desk. Clear eyes, good features. Probably in his mid-twenties then. What did you do, Clyde, that connected with Greg?

She got occasional e-mails from Ana, who had taken a position of some sort with the International Space Commission. Then, one evening close to Christmas, she called.

“Hey, kid, how are you doing?” she asked. The winsome smile was back. “You spending another scintillating Saturday night at the office?”

Kristi nodded ruefully. “Yup. It’s just the Yottabytes and me. No other way to win that Nobel before I’m forty.” Kristi stared hard at the screen. The Spacecraft Control Center logo glowed dimly over her shoulder. “Ana, are you where I think you are? How did you get up there?”

“The yo-yo tourists settled out of court, Kristi. I came back up to Clarke yesterday with a skeleton crew. Just in time. Five months earthside almost killed me. Be happy for me, I’m alive again.”

“I am, Ana. You know that.”

“I have something here for you. Where did I put it?” She pretended to fumble with her e-pad. “Aha! Yes. A little something for the holidays.”

Kristi’s e-pad beeped. She looked at what had arrived and gasped. All of Greg’s logs. “I owe you another crabcake dinner, Ana.”

“No chance I’ll collect that meal, Kristi, unless you bring the crustaceans up here yourself on your next observing run. I’m done with Earth. Too crowded. Too dirty. Too noisy.”

Kristi looked at the logs, and at Tombaugh’s picture.

Greg had been up there almost continually for three years. As she paged through the transmission, she saw that she had all his observations and calibrations. Everything.

The proprietary period was normally two years so part of it was already public. Kristi had long since thumbed through that, hoping to find something that would put her on the track of the Sagittarius sighting. But the recent stuff was something else. It had been released early, probably because of a family stipulation. Kristi scrolled through the lists, trying to get a feeling for what he’d been doing the past two years. And she discovered he’d been observing every brown dwarf in the Milky Way. My God, he was trying to prove I’d been right.

He had also observed every brown dwarf wannabe in her thesis, at higher resolution. He’d collected a billion spectra. He worked harder than I did. A lot of his observations were of cataclysmic binary stars, and she stripped those out of the file. She also removed the obvious quasars and Seyfert galaxies that masqueraded as brown dwarfs in her survey. That got her down to twenty million objects. Well, hell, it was a start. Sagittarius occupies just over 2 percent of the sky, but it includes the dense core of the Milky Way. Deleting everything not in Sagittarius decreased the sample size to four million. But now what?

Clyde Tombaugh’s photographic plates were her last hope, and she knew it. The plates were taken a few nights apart and Tombaugh had compared them, star by star. Pluto gave itself away by moving nightly, relative to the background stars. Greg’s reference to a “Clyde Tombaugh special” didn’t make any sense. Only solar system objects move enough in a few nights to be detectable. The nearest brown dwarf is twelve light-years away. Its nightly motion would have been far too slight for Tombaugh to have seen. Brown dwarf surveys of the early twenty-first century should have found anything closer. Greg, what did you mean?

The riddle gnawed at her. Her other research was beginning to suffer and Sills, the department chair, was visibly worried. “You’re up for tenure in a few years, Kristi. Don’t get sidetracked by unsolvable problems. You’ve got to keep publishing.”

Months went by with no progress and no publications.

She called Ana. “I think he saw something that moved.”

“But you’ve no idea what.”

“No. I’m looking for a needle in a haystack with four million straws.”

“It might not be as difficult as it sounds,” she said. “if you’re right, one must be different from all the others. If you examine Greg’s four million spectra for one second each, you’ll be done in seven weeks. That’s assuming you don’t eat, sleep, or bathe, but those are overrated anyway.”

The words hit home. One must be different from the others.

The four million Sagittarius objects were an astrophysical smorgasbord. They included twelve classes of cool variable stars whose spectra sometimes mimicked those of brown dwarfs. In her original work with brown dwarfs, she’d needed a year to eliminate these interlopers from her catalog. Which baby did I throw out with the bathwater? Every sorting algorithm in Numerical Recipes divided the objects into one of the twelve classes. Actually, though, there were thirteen classes. Twenty-two bona fide brown dwarfs had slipped into the detritus heap, and Greg had managed to scoop them back out. For the hundredth time, she idly glanced at the first few. They were similar, late T dwarfs, with temperatures around seven hundred Kelvins, hardly worth a second look. Something clicked. These spectra were too good. The resolution and signal-to-noise were better than anything she had ever seen. How did he get such great data?

She displayed the next six of Greg’s spectra. They were all virtual clones. Holding her breath, she overlaid all twenty-two plots on top of each other. Tiny shifts in radial velocity between them , she noted. Otherwise, they’re absolutely identical . “Let’s see where they are.” She scanned the list of celestial coordinates. All twenty-two objects lay within an area five hundred times smaller than the full moon. “ It can’t be a cluster of brown dwarfs because they’d have a much larger spread of radial velocities. She placed the coordinates in a plotting package, and two twists of a corkscrew stared back at her. Bingo! Not twenty-two objects. Just one.

Kristi, you’re as dumb as a rock. She sagged into a chair, shutting her eyes tight. The enormity of what Greg had found overwhelmed her. And he’d been swept away in the middle of it. His loss was suddenly clear and crushing. She held the spectra to her chest and began to cry.

Ana was leading the effort to reactivate the geosynchronous telescopes. There was no way to confirm or extend Greg’s discovery without Neugebauer. Kristi called and, on an encrypted line, told her what she’d found.