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

I dropped my eyes and tried to smile reassuringly. It must have been ludicrous. Her severe features softened. I showed her the envelope.

“Do you recognize the writing?”

She barely glanced at it. “It’s Dr. Dickinson’s.”

“Are you sure? I didn’t think Dickinson came to the Project until Hutch Chaney’s retirement. That was ’13, wasn’t it?”

“He took over as Director then. But he was an operating technician under Dr. Chaney for, oh, ten or twelve years before that.” Her eyes glowed when she spoke of Dickinson.

“I never met him,” I said.

“He was a fine man.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, her features pale. “If we hadn’t lost him, we might not have lost the Project.”

“If it matters,” I added gently.

“If it matters.”

She was right about Dickinson. He was articulate, a persuasive speaker, author of books on various subjects, and utterly dedicated to SETI. He might well have kept the Project afloat despite the cessation of federal funds and the increasing clamor among his colleagues for more time at the facility. But Dickinson was twelve years dead now. He’dreturned to Massachusetts at Christmas, as was his custom. After a snowstorm, he’d gone out to help shovel a neighbor’s driveway and his heart had failed.

At the time, I was at Georgetown. I can still recall my sense of a genius who had died too soon. He had possessed a vast talent, but no discipline; he had churned through his career hurling sparks in all directions. He had touched everything, but nothing had ever ignited. Particularly not SETI.

“Beth, was there ever a time they thought they had an LGM?”

“The Little Green Man signal?” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. They were always picking up echoes and things. But nothing ever came close. Either it was KCOX in Phoenix, or a Japanese trawler in the middle of the Pacific.”

“Never anything that didn’t fit those categories?”

One eyebrow rose slightly. “Never anything they could prove. If they couldn’t pin it down, they went back later and tried to find it again. One way or another, they eliminated everything.” Or, she must be thinking, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.

Beth’s comments implied that suspect signals had been automatically stored. Grateful that I had not yet got around to purging obsolete data, I discovered that was indeed the case, and ran a search covering the entire time period back to the Procyon reception in 2011. I was looking for a similar signal.

I got a surprise.

There was no match. There was also no record of the Procyon reception itself.

That meant presumably it had been accounted for and discarded.

Then why, two years later, had the recordings been sealed and placed in the safe? Surely no explanation would have taken that long.

SETI had assumed that any LGM signal would be a deliberate attempt to communicate, that an effort would therefore be made by the originator to create intelligibility, and that the logical way to do that was to employ a set of symbols representing universal constants: the atomic weight of hydrogen, perhaps, or the value of pi.

But the move to Sandage had also been a move to more sophisticated, and considerably more sensitive, equipment. The possibility developed that the Project would pick up a slopover signal, a transmission of alien origin, but intended only for local receivers. Traffic of that nature could be immeasurably difficult to interpret.

If the packet in the safe was anything at all, it was surely of this latter type. Forty gigahertz is not an ideal frequency for interstellar communication. Moreover, the intercept was ongoing, formless, no numbered parts, nothing to assist translation.

I set the computer working on the text, using SETI’s own language analysis program. Then I instructed Brackett to call me if anything developed, had dinner at Jimmy’s, and went home.

There was no evidence of structure in the text. In English, one can expect to find a ‘U’ after a ‘Q’, or a vowel after a cluster of consonants. The aspirate is seldom doubled, nothing is ever tripled, and so on. But in the Procyon transmission, everything seemed utterly random.

The computer counted 256 distinct pulse patterns. Eight bits. Nothing recurred at sufficient intervals to be a space. And the frequency count of these pulse patterns, or characters, was flat; there was no quantitative difference in use from one to another. All appeared approximately the same number of times. If it was a language, it was a language with no discernible vowels.

I called Wes Phillips, who was then the only linguist I knew. Was it possible for a language to be structured in such a way?

“Oh, I don’t think so. Unless you’re talking about some sort of construct. Even then—.” He paused. “Harry, I can give you a whole series of reasons in maybe six different disciplines why languages need high and low frequency letters. To have a flat ‘curve,’ a language would have to be deliberately designed that way, and it would have to be non-oral. But what practical value would it have? Why bother?”

Ed Dickinson had been an enigma. During the series of political crises that engulfed the nation after the turn of the century, he’d earned an international reputation as a diplomat, and as an eloquent defender of reason and restraint. Everyone agreed that he had a mind of the first rank. Yet, in his chosen field, he accomplished little. And eventually he’d gone to work for the Project, historically only a stepping-stone to serious effort. But he’d stayed.

Why?

Hutching Chaney was a different matter. A retired naval officer, he’d indulged in physics almost as a pastime. His political connections had been instrumental in getting Sandage built, and his assignment as Director was rumored to have been a reward for services rendered during the rough and tumble of congressional politics.

He possessed a plodding sort of competence. He was fully capable of grasping, and visualizing, extreme complexity. But he lacked insight and imagination, the ability to draw the subtle inference. After his retirement from Sandage, Chaney had gone to an emeritus position at MIT, which he’d held for five years.

He was a big man, more truck driver than physicist. Despite advancing age—he was then in his 70’s—and his bulk, he spoke and moved with energy. His hair was full and black. His light gray eyes suggested the shrewdness of a professional politician, and he possessed the confident congeniality of a man who had never failed at anything.

We were in his home in Somerville, Massachusetts, a stone and glass house atop sweeping lawns. It was not an establishment that a retired physicist would be expected to inhabit. Chaney’s moneyed background was evident.

He clapped a big hand on my shoulder and pulled me through one of those stiff, expensive living rooms that no one ever wants to sit in, into a paneled, leather-upholstered den at the rear of the house. “Martha,” he said to someone I couldn’t see, “would you bring us some port?” He looked at me for acquiescence.

“Fine,” I said. “It’s been a long time, Hutch.”

Books lined the walls, mostly engineering manuals, a few military and naval histories. An articulated steel gray model of the Lance dominated the fireplace shelf. That was the deadly hydrofoil which, built at Chaney’s urging, had contributed to a multi-purpose navy that was simultaneously lethal, flexible, and relatively cheap.

“The Church is infiltrating everywhere,” he said. “How are things at Sandage, Harry?”

I described some of the work in progress. He listened with interest.

A young woman arrived with a bottle, two glasses, and a plate of cheese. “Martha comes in three times a week,” Chaney said after she’d left the room. He smiled, winked, dipped a stick of cheese into the mustard, and bit it neatly in half. “You needn’t worry, Harry. I’m not capable of getting into trouble anymore. What brings you to Massachusetts?”