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

Joel squeezed her hand beneath the podium. “Great, Kristi,” he whispered. Lisa Meitner must have experienced the same wave of joy when she proved that an atomic nucleus could be broken into smaller parts. Kristi had never felt more alive. “Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for your attention.”

A forest of hands mushroomed in front of her.

Twenty years ago, Al Redwood walked out. He walked out of Ed Gelman’s old galactic survey project, out of his job, and out of town. I knew what it was all about. We all knew.

Al thought he had a message from M-82.

Gelman laughed at him. And I guess the rest of us did too.

There was no way to prove anything. All he could do was point to a narrow band transmission in the optical range, with peculiar symmetries and repeating pulse, wavelength, and intensity patterns. A laser, Al suspected.

I remember the final confrontation with Gelman, the day Al stormed out, the last time I’d seen him. They were on the front steps of the data center, on the front steps , for God’s sake, screaming at one another. Gelman didn’t want any little green men hanging around his project. So Al quit, and I never even got the chance to say goodbye.

He dropped out of sight for a couple of years. None of us heard anything. His family had money, so he didn’t have to work. And then I got a Christmas card from Texas: Nick , it said in his precise handwriting, it was the pulse clusters all the time. How could we have missed it?

There was no return address. But I knew that, out there somewhere, Al was still chasing his elusive vision. Later, over the years, there was more: on D.C. Marriott stationery: I still think the frequency correspondences are critical. One weakens, another intensifies. Is it a counterpoint of some kind? By the way, I’m doing fine. My best to Ginny and the kids. And hurriedly scribbled on a postcard with a picture of the Atheneum: Getting close. They’re out there, Nick. They’re really out there!

Al was a lot like M-82. Explosive. Remote. Lit by inner fires. Ultimately self-destructive. A man whose personal stars periodically went nova. Ironic that he of all people would imagine receiving a transmission from that chaotic place, which had erupted nine or ten million years ago, and which was undoubtedly still bubbling.

Periodically he’d say he was going to be in the area and would stop by. The first few times I got in a couple of bottles of Jamaican rum. He was big on rum. Later I didn’t bother.

It went on like that for two decades. Sporadic letters from odd places around the country, from Canada, from Europe, from Australia, once from Tokyo. Always promising progress. Sometimes they came in spurts, sometimes several years passed between communications. It was almost as if he were pursuing those goddamn gremlins around the world. He never spoke of anything else, other than to ask about my family, or my health. As far as I know, no one else ever heard from him at all.

Then one night at about 3:00 a.m., he showed up in a driving January rainstorm, and I’ll never forget how he looked, old and exhausted, his hair gone, his face creased. His top coat was open, his cardigan drenched. Water ran off his ears and nose. He stood in the storm, eyes empty, making no move to come in. “Nick,” he whispered, “I know what it is.” As if we’d last spoken the day before. As if someone had died.

I pulled him inside. “Hello, Al.”

He was shaking his head, staring at the night light that illuminated the staircase I’d just descended. I hit the wall switch, a table lamp came on, and he seemed to jerk awake. “I know it’s late,” he said. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb anyone.”

Ginny and the kids were all long gone by then. “No,” I said.

“Good.” Even for twenty years, he’d lost a lot of ground. I knew I’d grayed myself, slipped into middle age. But Al looked ready for a back porch and an apple tree. “You know what the sons of bitches did?”

“No.” What sons of bitches?

He peeled off his coat and, before I could get near him, lobbed it across an armchair. “We were on the wrong track right from the beginning, Nick. It never occurred to anybody we might be looking for something other than digital data.”

My God, he was off and running again. “Al,” I said, “what are you drinking?”

He ignored the question. “I mean, our working hypothesis had always been that an artificial transmission could be translated in some mathematical way. And that one that had come seven million light years would have to be a directed signal. A deliberate attempt to communicate. Right?”

I nodded. “How about brandy?” There was no rum in the house. “Sure. Now: an effort to communicate is going to contain instructions. It’s going to break easily. It has to. That’s the goddamn point!” He chewed his lip and I thought he was choking back tears. He went quiet for a while. “But it was never there. I tried every approach I could think of. NSA even had a crack at it. Did you know that ? They came up with nothing .” His eyes brightened with satisfaction. “Absolutely nothing. You know what Gelman thought?”

He ignored his brandy until I pointed to it. “You ought to get out of your shoes,” I said.

“Gelman thought it was a reflection . He couldn’t account for it any other way, so he decided it was a goddamn reflection. Nick, why do we always try so hard to explain everything away?”

“I don’t know.”

He sipped his drink. “Did you know he’s dead?”

“Gelman? Yes, I’d heard. It was a few years ago.”

“You know what I wanted, Nick? I wanted to show him. Son of a bitch, I wanted to walk in and hand him the evidence.” His shoulders slumped. “Just as well.” He shook his head and laughed. It was a curious kind of sound: amused, stoical, bitter. “Doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t have believed me anyway.”

There had been a time I’d thought Al Redwood was headed for a brilliant career. But even then he’d been a social black hole, a man with no existence outside the observatory. No family, no other friends. Only colleagues, and his work. It was painful to see him now, studying his fingerprints on the glass.

I was never sure why he felt drawn to me. Maybe it was my family. The older kids loved to listen to him. And Ginny and I often sat with him late into the evenings. My own career leveled off at a plateau roughly commensurate with my abilities, which is to say not very high. I accepted the fact early on that I wasn’t going to walk with giants. I was a maker of catalogues, an analyst, a man with an eye for detail. A recorder and observer of other people’s greatness.

He pulled off his shoes.

“What does it say?”

His eyes were cool and preoccupied behind thick lenses. I could see him running the question through again, his lips tightening slightly. “Weren’t you listening , Nick? It doesn’t say anything ! Not a goddamn thing.”

The storm rattled the house.

He got up, walked over to his coat, fumbled through the pockets, and produced a CD. “Here.” He held it out for me.

It looked ordinary enough. I took it, held it, looked at him. He was refilling his glass, his back to me. I sighed and slipped the disk into a player.

Al strolled across the room and stared out through the blinds.

I punched the START button.

“The neighborhood hasn’t changed much, Nick.” An electronic whisper blew through the room. “I assumed that the patterns of duration and intensity and color and the rest of it could be broken out into symbols. That it would have meaning.”