John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

“It’s working,” he called down to Patricia. She seemed to be shivering, perhaps from the rapid drop in temperature. He pulled the hose backward now and directed the stream at the other ants in the column. Through the heavy work gloves he wore the back-splatter of the liquid nitrogen was slowly freezing his fingers…

Alice stopped typing, yawned, and decided to save the file and go back to bed. An hour ago she had come wide awake and had decided to work on her novel for a while. She shut down the lapstation, turned off the dining room light, opened the door, and padded barefoot back into the darkened bedroom. She dropped her robe on the floor and crawled slowly back into her big bed. She stretched and pulled the sheet over her nakedness. She felt wonderful.

She could hear George’s soft breathing beside her. She looked at him, sleeping peacefully with a contented smile on his face, and she thought about recent events. He was wonderful. She thought perhaps she was in love with him. It had all been very exciting. It had been romantic, too. His delight at finding the Snark had turned to passion. It was fun while it lasted. But realistically, it couldn’t last much longer.

She had to earn her living by finishing Fire Ants. A great deal of money was at stake. Their lovemaking had inspired her to write a great new scene. But when George found out why she was really studying life at the SSC so closely, the chances were he would want to have nothing more to do with her. She had come here to Waxahachie under false pretenses, and that fact was likely to sour their blossoming relationship. Nevertheless, she had to tell him. Soon. She sighed and snuggled against him. But not yet.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of light from across the room. She rolled over, facing the dresser. George had placed the scintillator bar on the dresser, its open end toward the wall. In the mirror she could see its blue glow. It was flashing. But just as she focused her attention on it, the flashes stopped and there was only the faint and continuous blue glow. She waited, drowsy now. Perhaps she had dreamed the flashes.

Then, as she was almost dozing off, they came again. Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash. Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash-Flash… This went on for a while and then stopped again.

She waited, wide awake now. In a few minutes the flashing began again. This time she counted flashes. 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37. Then it stopped. Twelve numbers. Something was familiar about their sequence. When she had worked as a reporter for the Democrat, Alice had interviewed some Florida State University astronomers about their research. They had been using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI they had called it. They were searching for radio signals that might have been sent by some hypothetical alien race that lived in another star system.

After the usual jokes about picking up alien game shows on TV and whether that could be construed as intelligence, Alice had asked about strategies for making the initial contact. How could they be sure that a message they received was not random noise or some natural phenomenon? Or, to put it the other way, how would they send a simple radio signal that was clearly a product of an intelligent species? One answer had been to send a sequence of prime numbers, numbers that had no integer divisors. She was sure that the first few primes were 2-3-5-7-11-13. The Snark, Alice decided, was trying to send a message. The Snark wasn’t an exotic particle. It was… something else… something much more important than that. She shook George awake.

ALICE GLANCED AT THE WALL CLOCK AS ROGER COULTON arrived at George’s LEM office. It was just after nine o’clock on Sunday morning. Roger looked a bit hungover as he stood in the doorway, unfocused and rather disheveled. He absent-mindedly rubbed a spot on the inside of his thigh.

“Good morning, Roger,” said Alice. “Sorry we had to abandon you at P. J.’s. I presume George told you about our successful Snark hunt last night.” She didn’t want to advertise the fact that she had been in bed next to him when George had made the call.

“He certainly did,” Roger said. “Hours ago.” He yawned. “So you two have actually managed to isolate George’s mystery particle, which is now embedded in a scintillation counter. And you’ve discovered that it gives off a blue glow.”

Alice pointed to the unit on George’s desk. The scintillation cylinder now had a lighttight metal cap mounted on its narrow end. “A blue glow that flashes,” she said.

“A single wavelength blue glow that flashes,” George added. “I decided we might get a clue from the optical spectrum of the glow, so this morning we looked at the light with a small grating spectrograph. That turned out to be interesting. The thing has only one spectral line: bright blue, with a wavelength of 439.7 nanometers, if I did the calibration right.”

“What atomic transition makes such a line?” asked Roger.

“I don’t know,” said George. “I tried looking it up on the Web in an atomic physics database, but there was no match.”

“Curious,” said Roger.

“It gets even more curious,” said George.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Alice added.

George frowned at her, then smiled. “To come to the point, Roger, the thing flashes. And this morning we discovered that even when the blue light seems to be continuous, it has a time structure. It’s sending binary code at about ten kilohertz,” he said.

“What?” Roger turned, studying the two of them. “Is this a joke?”

“Perhaps it is,” said George, “but I assure you that it isn’t my joke. Alice first noticed that the flashes came in groups with the sequence 2-3-5-7-11-13-17-19-23-29-31-37, the first 12 prime numbers. And the binary stream gives the first 144 prime numbers in binary code.”

Alice suddenly had a terrible thought. What if all of this was a joke, a joke on her? Perhaps they had found out that she was here under false pretenses and decided to teach her a lesson by preparing an elaborate hoax to make the woman science reporter look foolish. It wouldn’t even have to be all that elaborate, a simple battery-powered microprocessor concealed in the scintillator thing to make the blue light flashes under the control of a program. George and Roger could both be in on it, and maybe others, too. Perhaps even the Snark event had been staged for her benefit.

She thought more about this possibility, then began to relax. They’d have to be awfully good actors, she decided. And how could anyone know that she would notice the flashes last night? No, it’s probably not a hoax, she decided. In any case, she had no choice but to go along with the thing for the moment, play her assigned role, and watch carefully.

Alice looked closely at Roger, who had been silent for a while. He now looked much more alert, she thought. Apparently he had recovered from his hangover.

“Can I have a look at the time structure?” he asked finally.

“Thought you’d never ask,” said George. He showed Roger a sheet containing several parallel traces of rectangular peaks and valleys. “I synched this plot at what I think is the starting point. The ones and zeros below the trace are a rendering in binary and hex. That’s the preamble. After the primes, it goes into another mode that we haven’t been able to penetrate.

“The overall pattern is that it makes the flashes, then the binary primes, then followed by the other stuff. That sequence repeats about every five minutes. The stuff that comes after the binary primes is different each time, though it may repeat, too, after a while.”