Jack McDevitt: Cauldron

I’m indebted for advice and technical assistance to David DeGraff of Alfred University; Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History; and Michael Fossel, author of Cells, Aging, and Human Disease . Walter Cuirle and Travis Taylor helped out at the galactic core. Thanks also to Ralph Vicinanza, for his continuing support. To Maureen McDevitt, for her comments on an early version of the manuscript. And to my editor, Ginjer Buchanan. Star chart by Curtis Square-Briggs.

For Jamie Bishop

The call came, as such things always seemed to, in the middle of the night. “ Jason? ” Lucy’s voice on the other end. Tense. Excited. But she was trying to sound professional. Unemotional.

Jason Hutchins’s first thought was that Lucy’s mother had suffered another breakdown. The woman was apparently given to nervous collapses, and the family always called Lucy. Teresa, also awakened by the call, raised an arm in protest, then pulled a pillow over her head. “Yes, Lucy? What’s the problem?”

“ We have a hit! ”

That brought him fully alert.

It had happened before. Periodically they got a signal that had set off alarms. Usually it vanished within minutes and was never heard again. Occasionally, it was a human transmission bouncing around. Never during the two and a half centuries of the search had they gotten a legitimate strike. A demonstrably artificial transmission that could be confirmed. Not once. And he knew as he rolled out of bed, as he grumbled to Teresa that no there wasn’t a problem, that he’d be back in an hour or so, he knew that this would be no different.

It was at times like this, when he conceded that SETI was essentially a religious exercise, that it took a leap of faith to sit down each day in front of the screens and pretend something might actually happen, that he wondered why he hadn’t looked for a career that would provide at least the opportunity for an occasional breakthrough. Whole generations of true believers had manned the radio telescopes, some in orbit, some on the back side of the moon, a few on mountaintops, waiting for the transmission that never came. They joked about it. Waiting for Godot. I know when it happens, I’ll be at lunch.

“I do it for the money,” he told people when they asked.

A lot had changed since the early days of the project. The technology, of course, had improved exponentially. There were starships now. It was possible to go out and actually look at the worlds orbiting Alpha Centauri and 36 Ophiuchi and other reasonably nearby stars. We knew now that life existed elsewhere, even that intelligent life had flourished in a few places. But only one extant technological world was known, and that was a savage place, its nation-states constantly at war, too busy exhausting their natural resources and killing on a massive scale to advance beyond an early-twentieth-century level.

So yes, there were other places. Or at least there was one other place. And we knew there had been others. But they were in ruins, lost in time, and the evidence suggested that once you entered an industrial phase, you began a countdown and survived only a few more centuries.

But maybe not. Maybe somewhere out there, there was the kind of place you read about in novels. A place that had stabilized its environment, that had conquered its own worst instincts, and gone on to create a true civilization.

He wore a resigned smile as he left the house. It was a clear, moonless night. The skies were brighter, less polluted, than they had been when he was young. They were beginning to win that battle, at least. And, if there were still occasional armed arguments between local warlords, they’d gotten through the era of big wars and rampant terrorism.

With starflight, the future looked promising. He wondered what his daughter, Prissy, who’d still be young at the dawn of the new century, would live to see. Maybe one day she’d shake the mandible of a genuine alien. Or visit a black hole. At the moment, anything seemed possible.

He climbed into the flyer. “ Where to, Jason? ” it asked.

Lucy was so excited when he walked in she could barely contain herself. “It’s still coming, Jason,” she said.

“What are we listening to tonight?” He’d been gone several days, at a conference, and had lost track of the schedule.

“Sigma 2711,” she said. It was an old class-G located out beyond NCG6440, roughly halfway to the galactic core. Fourteen thousand light-years. If it turned out to be legitimate, it wasn’t going to be somebody with whom they could hold a conversation.

Lucy was a postdoc, from Princeton. She was energetic, driven, maybe a little too enthusiastic. Marcel Cormley, her mentor, didn’t approve of her assignment to the Drake Center. She was too talented to waste her time on what he perceived as a crank operation. He hadn’t said that to Hutchins’s face, of course, but he’d made no secret to his colleagues about his feelings. Hutchins wasn’t entirely sure he was wrong. Moreover, he suspected Lucy had come to the Center primarily because Cormley had opposed it. However that might be, she had thrown herself into the work, and he could ask no more than that. In fact, enthusiasm was probably a drawback in a field that, generation after generation, showed no results. Still, she was getting experience in astronomical fundamentals.

“Does it still look good, Tommy?” he asked the AI.

Tommy, who was named for Thomas Petrocelli, the designer of the first officially designated AI, took a moment to consider. “ This one might be a genuine hit, ” he said.

“Let me see it.” Jason sat down in front of a monitor.

“It repeats every seventeen minutes and eleven seconds,” said Lucy. Light bars flickered across the screen. “The sequence is simple.” Four. Then two clusters of four. Then four clusters. Then four clusters of eight. And eight of eight.

“It keeps doubling,” he said.

“Up to 256. Then it runs backward.”

“Okay. What else is there?”

“You get about two minutes of the pattern. Then it goes away, and we get this.” A long, apparently arbitrary, sequence began. He watched it for several minutes before turning aside. “Tommy,” he said, “are we making any progress?”

“ It has markers. But ask me later. ”

Lucy stood off to one side, her gaze tracking between him and the AI’s speaker. She looked as if she were praying. Yes, Lord, let it be so. She was blond, a bit on the heavy side, although she never seemed to lack for boyfriends. They were always picking her up and dropping her off.

Jason pushed back in his chair. He wasn’t going to allow himself to believe it was actually happening. Not after all this time. It couldn’t just drop in his lap like this. It had to be a system bug. Or a hoax.

Lucy, apparently finished with her entreaties to the spiritual world, returned to her chair, pressed her hands together, and stared at the screen. “I wonder what they’re saying.”