John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

“What the hell?” muttered one of the electronics technicians as he punched at the controls of an oscilloscope. The screen of the scope flashed green and fluttered, then stabilized in a fixed trace. It showed a sequence of up-and-down rectangular traces. At the left of the screen the square-cornered swings were widely spaced, but as they progressed across the screen they grew closer and closer together until they merged into a continuous blur of blue haze.

“That’s a different pattern,” Alice said, remembering the sequence of regularly spaced ones and zeros that the Snark had been producing for the past ten days.

“Yes,” said George. He turned to Roger. “It’s a good thing you wouldn’t bet with me,” he said. “We’ve made contact. They’re obviously telling us to transmit faster.”

IT HAD BEEN A BUSY WEEK FOR ALICE, GEORGE thought. She had backed up the SSC laboratory’s press release about the Snark discovery with her personal account, which had been distributed internationally by Associated Press. At the press conference the day after the seminar, she had been designated as pool reporter to feed new information to the reporters who had converged on the laboratory to cover the story. And her Search article on the Snark discovery had been the magazine’s featured cover story for the week.

George had framed an enlarged copy of the Search cover. It now hung on the wall of the Snark laboratory opposite him. In the bookshelf below it was a copy of Time bearing its own cover heralding the discovery. He noticed that Alice was thumbing through a similar copy of Newsweek.

“How did Newsweek treat us?” he asked.

“Not bad,” she said, “but they did garble a few key points. They seem to think that Roger is also a member of the LEM collaboration. By the way, how is Roger? Any news?”

“I called the hospital this morning,” said George. “He’s at his apartment resting now. The doctor told me that his second seizure was worse than the first. I’m very worried.” Roger’s brilliance had been essential to the Snark contact. The doctors seemed to be having trouble establishing what his medical problem was.

George stroked his beard as he studied the terminal display. The Snark was simultaneously communicating with him, racing like a wildfire from database to database on the Internet, asking a continuous string of questions to various experts, and filling the latest in a series of ultra-high-density one-terabyte holographic optical platters.

The first level of the Snark download, about a terabyte of easily decoded information on the science, mathematics, biology, culture, arts, history, and philosophy of the race of Makers, had already been transmitted and was being widely distributed and analyzed. Now the second-level transmission was in progress. More detailed information about the Makers’ culture and science, along with information about the other civilizations that the Makers had contacted, was being received. The SSC data analysts on Team Snark were processing these new tapes offline and making the information they contained available on the Internet as quickly as they could, which was not nearly fast enough to satisfy the information-starved world tied into the network.

George pressed a switch and spoke into the microphone before him on the desk. “Tunnel Maker?” he said.

“I’m here, George,” the voice from the speaker on the desk, the voice they had come to identify as that of Tunnel Maker, said.

“I see you have been making good use of the Internet,” George said.

“Yes,” said Tunnel Maker. “Our historians have been studying your recent history, and they unexpectedly cleared up a nuclear astrophysics mystery that had been puzzling us.”

“Really?” Alice, standing behind George, said into the microphone.

“Yes,” said Tunnel Maker. “When our Bridgehead was moving through your detector, we noticed that it passed through a region of almost pure element 92, isotope 238—what you call uranium-238,1 believe. The mystery was: Why was there almost no trace of isotopes 234 and 235, which should be present in small concentrations? There were speculations that nucleosynthesis somehow worked in a different way in your universe than in ours.”

“We use depleted uranium in the LEM detector,” George said.

“So we deduced,” said Tunnel Maker. “We studied the history of your Manhattan Project and later nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor programs and concluded that the uranium-238 in your detector must be what was left over when the lighter isotopes were removed for bombs and reactor fuel.”

“Exactly,” said George.

“Your species has never made nuclear weapons?” Alice asked.

“No,” said Tunnel Maker, “we have weapons and conflicts, but nothing quite like yours. However, you have emerged from a very dangerous period, and you are to be congratulated. It appears to us that the enormous destructive power of the weapons you developed held your great nations in place without major conflicts long enough for the inherent problems of some of your political systems to become obvious even to their adherents. Our historians find this very interesting.”

“Yes,” said George, “we do live in interesting times.” He had decided that Tunnel Maker should be told about the impact his contact was having. “You should know that you’re creating a lot of new problems here,” he said. “There’s been a stock market crash in the high-technology and manufacturing sectors. The U.S. Congress is now debating a bill that would expropriate our Bridgehead and place it at Livermore, behind a wall of high security. Other countries are threatening censures, boycotts, and even military action if that is done. And our ‘open’ SSC laboratory has become an armed camp, with DOE security guards brought in from all over the country to protect us from the news media, the industrial spies, and the curiosity seekers. We on Team Snark have had to move our base of operations twice so far. We’ve now relocated belowground in a side tunnel of the ring.”

“It’s also been very exciting,” Alice chimed in. “There has been enormous coverage of your contact with us in the news media. I’ve become the ‘pool reporter’ for every news organization in the world.”

“You should not concern yourselves unduly about these problems,” Tunnel Maker said. “Change is always somewhat painful. This difficult initial phase is about to reach its successful completion.”

Alice blinked. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“We have almost completed the transmission of the second-level information. In about one more rotation of your planet our transmission stream will conclude, except to answer questions you may wish to ask us. But now I must ask you to help me. Our Concantation of Individuals is pleased with the way things have gone so far and has reached a consensus. I am authorized to proceed with the second phase of our contact.”

“What is the second phase?” asked George.

“In a manner of speaking, I’m coming for a visit,” said Tunnel Maker. “You will need to find a quiet place for the first part of it, well away from the busy environment of your laboratory.” “A visit?” exclaimed George. His mind raced, trying to imagine how that might happen.

“Wow!” said Alice and began to type into her lapstation.

“Just how do you propose to do that?” George asked. “Do you plan to come through the wormhole?”

“Pick up the scintillator unit and look underneath,” said Tunnel Maker.

George stood, reached out, and picked up the black object. Beneath it a cavity had seemingly been carved out of the plastic and pressed wood of the desktop. In the cavity was a small white sphere about the size of a large marble. He studied the underside of the scintillation bar. There was a small hole there, just over the place where the cavity and egg had appeared, and a thin beam of blue light emerged from it. “What is this white sphere on the table?” George asked. “Where did it come from?”