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

I extracted the vocordings from my briefcase and handed them across to him. I watched patiently as he leafed through the thick sheaf of paper, and saw with satisfaction his change of expression.

“You’re kidding, Harry,” he said. “Somebody really found one? When’d it happen?”

“Twenty years ago,” I said, passing him the envelope and the original disks.

He turned them over in his hands. “You’re not serious? There’s a mistake somewhere.”

“It was in the safe,” I said.

He shook his head. “Doesn’t much matter where it was. Nothing like this ever happened.”

“Then what is it?”

“Damned if I have any idea.”

We sat not talking while Chaney continued to flip pages, grunting. He seemed to have forgotten his wine. “You run this yourself?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Hell of a lot of trouble for somebody to go to for a joke. Were the computers able to read any of it? No? That’s because it’s gibberish.” He stared at the envelope. “But it is Ed’s handwriting.”

“Would Dickinson have any reason to keep such a thing quiet?”

“Ed? No. Dickinson least of all. No one wanted to hear a signal more than he did. He wanted it so badly he invested his life in the Project.”

“But could he, physically, have done this? Could he have picked up the LGM? Could he have done it without anyone else knowing? Was he good enough with computers to cover his tracks?”

“This is pointless. Yes, he could have done it. And you could walk through Braintree without your pants.”

A light breeze was coming through a side window, billowing the curtains. It was cool and pleasant, unusual for Massachusetts in August. Some kids were playing halfball out on the street.

“Forty megahertz,” he said. “Sounds like a satellite transmission.”

“That wouldn’t have taken two years to figure out, would it? Why keep the disks?”

“Why not? I expect if you go down into the storeroom you’ll find all kinds of relics.”

Outside, there was a sound like approaching thunder, exploding suddenly into an earsplitting screech. A stripped-down T-Bolt skidded by, scattering the ballplayers. An arm hung leisurely out the driver’s side. The car took the corner stop sign at about 45. A couple of fingers went up, but otherwise the game resumed as though nothing had happened.

“All the time,” Chaney said. His back to the window, he hadn’t bothered to look around. “Cops can’t keep up with them anymore.”

“Why was Dickinson so interested in the Project?”

“Ed was a great man.” His face clouded somewhat, and I wondered if the port hadn’t drawn his emotions close to the surface. “You’d have to know him. You and he would have got along fine. He had a taste for the metaphysical, and I guess the Project was about as close as he could get.”

“How do you mean?”

“Did you know he spent two years in a seminary? Yes, somewhere outside Philadelphia. He was an altar boy who eventually wound up at Harvard. And that was that.”

“You mean he lost his faith?”

“Oh, yes. The world became a dark place, full of disaster. He always seemed to have the details on the latest pogrom, or viral outbreak, or drive-by murder. There are only two kinds of people, he told me once: atheists, and folks who haven’t been paying attention. But he always retained that fine mystical sense of purpose that you drill into your best kids, a notion that things are somehow ordered. When I knew him, he wouldn’t have presumed to pray to anyone. But he had all the drive of a missionary, and the same conviction of—.” He dropped his head back on the leather upholstery and tried to seize a word from the ceiling. —Destiny.

“Ed wasn’t like most physicists. He was competent in a wide range of areas. He wrote on foreign affairs for Commentary and Harper’s ; he wrote on ornithology and systems analysis, on Malcolm Muggeridge, and Edward Gibbon.”

He swung easily out of his chair and reached for a pair of fat matched volumes in mud-brown covers. It was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , the old Modern Library edition. “He’s the only person I’ve ever known who’s actually read the thing.” He turned the cover of volume one so that I could see the inscription:

For Hutch,

In the fond hope that we can hold off the potherbs and the pigs.

Ed

“He gave it to me when I left SETI.”

“Seems like an odd gift. Have you read it?”

He laughed off the question. “You’d need a year.”

“What’s the business about the potherbs and pigs?”

He rose and walked casually to the far wall. There were photos of naval vessels and aircraft, of Chaney and President Fine, of the Sandage complex. He seemed to screw his vision into the latter. “I don’t remember. It’s a phrase from the book. He explained it to me at the time. But….” He held his hands outward, palms up.

“Hutch, thanks.” I got up to go.

“There was no signal,” he said. “I don’t know where these recordings came from, but Ed Dickinson would have given anything for a contact.”

“Hutch, is it possible that Dickinson might have been able to translate the text? If there had been one?”

“Not if you couldn’t. He had the same program.”

I don’t like cities.

Dickinson’s books were all out of print, and the used bookstores were clustered in Cambridge. Even then, the outskirts of Boston, like the city proper, were littered with broken glass and discarded newspapers. Surly kids milled outside bars. Windows everywhere were smashed or boarded. I went through a red light at one intersection rather than learn the intentions of an approaching band of ragged children with hard eyes. (One could scarcely call them children, though I doubt there was one over twelve.) Profanity covered the crumbling brick walls as high as a hand could reach. Much of it was misspelled.

Boston had been Dickinson’s city. I wondered what the great humanist thought when he drove through these streets.

I found only one of his books: Malcolm Muggeridge: Faith and Despair . The store also had a copy of The Decline and Fall . On impulse, I bought it.

I was glad to get back to the desert.

We were entering a period of extraordinary progress, during which we finally began to understand the mechanics of galactic structure. McCue mapped the core of the Milky Way, Osterberger developed his unified field concepts, and Schauer constructed his celebrated revolutionary hypothesis on the nature of time. Then, on a cool morning in October, a team from Cal Tech announced that they had a new set of values for hyperinflation.

In the midst of all this, we had an emergency. One night in late September, Earl Barlow, who was directing the Cal Tech groups, suffered a mild heart attack. I arrived just before the EMT’s, at about 2:00 a.m.

While the ambulance carrying Barlow started down the mountain, his people watched helplessly, drinking coffee, too upset to work. The opportunity didn’t catch me entirely unprepared. I gave Brackett his new target. The blinking lights of the emergency vehicle were hardly out of sight before the parabolas swung round and fastened on Procyon.

But there was only the disjointed crackle of interstellar static.

I took long walks on the desert at night. The parabolas are lovely in the moonlight. Occasionally, the stillness is broken by the whine of an electric motor, and the antennas slide gracefully along their tracks. It was, I thought, a new Stonehenge of softly curving shapes and fluid motion.

The Muggeridge book was a slim volume. It was not biographical, but rather an analysis of the philosopher’s conviction that the West has a death wish. It was the old argument that God had been replaced by science, that man had gained knowledge of a trivial sort, and as a result lost purpose.