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  Suddenly Saul claimed he knew how to refute John’s approximation. His idea was to solve a particularly simple test problem where they already knew what the answer should be. Saul zoomed through the calculation. Only for one narrow range of physical conditions did the approximation give the right answer. “There! Sec it’s no good.”

  John shook his head. “Bugger off—it works precisely for the most interesting case.”

  Saul seethed. “Nonsense! You’ve thrown all the long wave lengths out of the problem.”

  But heads nodded around them. John had won. Since the embattled approximation was not totally useless, it was acceptable. Saul grudgingly agreed and a moment later was smiling and discussing something else, the issue forgotten. There was no point in remaining excited about an issue where something could be proved. Gordon grinned. It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

  He approached Carroway and held out the coordinates from his message. “Bernard, do you have any idea where this is in the sky?”

  Carroway blinked owlishly at the numbers. “No, no, I never remember such details. Saul?” He pointed at the paper.

  “Near Vega,” Saul said. “I’ll look it up for you, if you want.”

  • • •

  After his lecture on Classical Electrodynamics Gordon intended to search out Saul Shriffer, but when he dropped by his office to leave off his lecture notes someone was waiting. It was Ramsey, the chemist.

  “Say, thought I’d zip by and update you,” Ramsey said. “I looked into that little riddle you gave me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think there’s some real meat there. We’re a long way from understanding much about long-chain molecules, y’know, but I’m interested in that puzzle. The part where it says, ‘enters molecular simulation regime begins imitating host.’ That sounds like a self-replicating mechanism we don’t know beans about.”

  “Does that happen with the molecular forms you know?”

  Ramsey’s brow wrinkled. “Nope. But I’ve been studying the special fertilizing forms some of the companies are experimenting with, and… well, it’s too early to say. Just a hunch, really. What I came to tell you is that I haven’t forgotten about the thing. Classes and my regular grants, y’know—they stack up on you. But I’ll keep nudging along at it. Might go down and bug Walter Munk about the oceanography connection. Anyway—” he stood, giving a mock salute of goodbye—“I appreciate the info. Might be a good lead. Gratz a lots.”

  “Huh?”

  “Gratz—gracias. Spanish.”

  “Oh. Sure.” The cavalier Californian appropriation of Spanish slang seemed apt for Ramsey. Yet beneath the used-car salesman manner a quick mind worked. Gordon was glad the man was looking into the first message and hadn’t let it fall into a crack. This seemed to be a lucky day; threads were weaving together. Yes, a lucky day. “I’d give it an A plus so far,” Gordon mused to himself, and went looking for Shriffer.

  • • •

  “I nailed it for you,” Saul said decisively, finger arrowing down at a speck on a star chart. It’s a point very close to a normal F7 star, named 99 Hercules.”

  “But not smack on it?”

  “No, but very close. What’s behind all this, anyway? What’s a solid state physicist need a star position for?”

  Gordon told him about the persistent signals and showed him Cooper’s recent decoding. Saul quickly became excited. He and a Russian, Kadarsky, were writing a paper together on the detection of extraterrestrial civilizations. Their operating assumption was that radio signals were the natural choice. But if Gordon’s signals were indeed unexplainable in terms of earthly transmissions, Saul suggested, why not consider the hypothesis of extraterrestrial origin? The coordinates clearly pointed that way.

  “See—Right Ascension is 18 hours, 5 minutes, 36 seconds. Now, 99 Hercules is this dot at 18 hours, 5 minutes, 8 seconds, a little off. Declination of your signal is 30 degrees, 29.2 minutes. That fits.”

  “So? They don’t agree exactly.”

  “But they’re damned close!” Saul waved his hands. “A few seconds difference is nothing.”

  “How in hell does an extraterrestrial know our system of astronomical measurements?” Gordon said skeptically.

  “How do they know our language? By listening to our old radio programs, of course. Look—parallax for 99 Hercules is a 0.06. That means it’s over sixteen parsecs away.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, about 51 light years.”

  “How could they be signaling, then? Radio came in about sixty years ago. There hasn’t been time for light to go the round trip—it would take over a century. So they can’t be answering our own radio stations.”

  “True.” Saul appeared momentarily deflated. “You say there’s some more to the message?” He brightened. “Let me see.”

  After a moment he stabbed the printed message and exclaimed, “Right! That’s it. See this word?”

  “Which?”

  “Tachyon. Greek origin. Means ‘fast one,’ I’ll bet. That means they’re using some faster-than-light transmission.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Gordon, use your imagination. It fits, damn it!”

  “Nothing travels faster than light.”

  “This message says something does.”

  “Crap. Just crap.”

  “Okay, how do you explain this? ‘Should appear as point source in tachyon spectrum 263 KEV peak.’ KEV—kilovolts. They’re using tachyons, whatever they are, of energy 263 kilovolts.”

  “Doubtful,” Gordon said severely.

  “What about the rest? ‘Can verify with NMR directionality. Measurement follows.’ NMR—Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Then garbage, a few more words, then garbage again. SMISSION FROM 19BD 1998COORGHQE and so on.”

  “Not all garbage. See—the rest is simple dots and dashes.”

  “Hummm.” Saul peered at the pattern. “Interesting.”

  “Look, Saul, I appreciate the—”

  “Wait a sec. 99 Hercules isn’t just any star, you know. I looked it up. It fits into the kind of star class we think might support life.”

  Gordon purses his lips and looked dubious.

  “Right, it’s an F7. Slightly heavier than our sun—more massive, I mean—and with a big region around it capable of supporting life. It’s a binary star—wait, wait, I know what you’re going to say,” Saul said dramatically, pushing his open, upright palm toward Gordon, who had no idea what he was going to say. “Binary stars can’t have livable planets around them, right?”

  “Uh, why not?”

  “Because the planets get perturbed. Only 99 Hercules doesn’t have that problem. The two stars circle each other only every 54.7 years. They’re far apart, with livable spaces around each of them.”

  “Both are F7s?”

  “As far as we can tell, the bigger one is. You only need one,” he added lamely.

  Gordon shook his head. “Saul, I appreciate—”

  “Gordon, let me have a look at that message. The dots and dashes, I mean.”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “Do me a favor. I think there’s something big here. Maybe our ideas about radio communication and the 21-centimeter line of hydrogen being the natural choice—maybe they’re all wrong. I want to check this message of yours out. Just don’t make up your mind. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Gordon said reluctantly.

  • • •

  When Gordon lugged his briefcase into his office the next morning, Saul was waiting for him. The sight of Saul’s eager face, with brown eyes that danced as he spoke, filled him with a premonition.

  “I cracked it,” Saul said tersely. “The message.”

  “What… ?”

  “The dots and dashes at the end? That spelled no words? They aren’t words—they’re a picture!”

  Gordon gave him a skeptical look and put down his briefcase.<
br />
  “I counted the dashes in that long transmission. ‘Noise,’ you said. There were 1537 dashes.”

  “So?”

  “Frank Drake and I and a lot of otter people have been thinking of ways to transfer pictures by simple on-off signals. It’s simple—send a rectangular grid.”

  “That scrambled part of the message? RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS and so on.”

  “Correct. To lay out a grid you need to know how many lines to take on each axis. I tried a bunch of combinations that multiply out to 1537. All gave a mess, except a 29-by-53 grid. Laying the dashes out on that scheme gave a picture. And 29 and 53 are both prime numbers—the obvious choice, when you think about it. There is only that one way to break 1537 down into a product of primes.”

  “Ummm. Very clever. And this is the picture?”

  Saul handed Gordon a sheet of graph paper with a point filled in for each dash in the transmission. It showed a complex interweaving set of curves moving from right to left. Each curve was made of clusters of dots, arranged in a regular but complicated pattern. “What is it?” Gordon asked.

  “I don’t know. All the practice problems Frank and I made up gave pictures showing solar systems, with one planet picked out—things like that. This one doesn’t look anything like that.”

  Gordon tossed the drawing on his desk. “Then what use is it?”

  “Well—hell! An immense amount of good, once we figure it out.”

  “Well…”

  “What’s the matter? You think this is wrong?”

  “Saul, I know you’ve got a reputation for thinking about—what’s that Hermann Kahn calls it?—the unthinkable. But this—!”

  “You think I’m making all this up?”

  “Me? Me? Saul, I detected this message. I showed it to you. But your explanation—! Faster-than-light telegraph signals from another star. But the coordinates don’t quite fit! A picture coming out of the noise. But the picture makes no sense! Come on, Saul.”

  Saul’s face reddened and he stepped back, hands on hips. “You’re blind, you know that? Blind.”

  “Let’s say… skeptical.”

  “Gordon, you’re not giving me a break.”

  “Break? I admit you’ve got some sort of case. But until we understand that picture of yours, it doesn’t hold water.”

  “Okay. O-kay,” Saul said dramatically, smacking a fist into his left palm. “I’ll find out what that drawing means. We’ll have to go to the whole academic community to solve the riddle.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We’ll have to go public.”

  “Ask around?”

  “Ask who? What specialty? Astrophysics? Biology? When you don’t know, you have to keep your mind open.”

  “Yes… but…” Gordon suddenly remembered Ramsey. “Saul, there’s another message.”

  “What?”

  “I got it months ago. Here.” He rummaged through his desk drawers and found the transcript. “Try that on for size.”

  Saul studied the long typed lines. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do L”

  “You’re sure this is valid?”

  “As sure as I am of what you’ve already deciphered.”

  “Shit.” Saul collapsed into a chair. “This really confuses things.”

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

  “Gordon, it makes no sense”

  “Neither does your picture.”

  “Look, maybe you’re getting conflicting messages. When you tune into different radio stations, you get music on one, sports on another, current events on a third. Maybe you’ve got a receiver here that just scoops up everything.”

  “Um.”

  Saul leaned forward in his chair and pressed his palms against his temples. Gordon realized the man was tired. He had probably stayed up all night working on the breakdown of the picture. He felt a sudden burst of sympathy for him. Saul was already known as a proponent of the interstellar communication idea, and a lot of astronomers thought he was too wild, too speculative, too young and impulsive. Well, so what—that didn’t mean he was wrong.

  “Okay, Saul, I’ll accept the picture idea—provisionally. It can’t be an accident. So—what is it? We have to find out.” He told Saul about Ramsey. That merely complicated matters, but he felt Saul had a right to know.

  “Gordon, I still think we’ve got something here.”

  “So do I.”

  “I think we ought to go public.”

  “With the biochemistry, too? The first message?”

  “No…” Saul thought. “No, just with this second message. It’s clear. It repeats itself for pages. How often did you get that first signal?”

  “Once.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Then let’s forget it.”

  “Why?”

  “It might be a decoding error.”

  Gordon remembered Lakin’s story about Lowell. “Well…”

  “Look, I’ve got a lot more experience with these things than you do. I know what people will say. If you muddy the water around a subject, nobody jumps in.”

  “We’d be withholding information.”

  “Withholding, yes. But not forever. Just until we find out what the picture means.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “We’ll give them only one problem at a time.” Saul raised a finger. “One problem. Later, we’ll tell the whole story.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Gordon, look. I think this is the way to do it. Will you take my advice?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll take it, go public. I’m known. I’m a crazy guy who fools around with interstellar radio signals and all that stuff. A certified authority on a nonexistent subject. I can get the attention of the academic community.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “One problem at a time, Gordon!”

  “Well…”

  “First, the picture. Later, the rest.”

  “Well…” Gordon had a class coming up. Saul had a hypnotic quality about him, the ability to make notions seem plausible and even obvious. But, Gordon thought, a sow’s ear with a ribbon around it was still a sow’s ear. Still… “Okay. You get into the ring. I’m staying out.”

  “Hey, thanks.” Suddenly Saul was shaking his head. “I appreciate that. I really do. It’s a great break.”

  “Yeah,” Gordon said. But he felt no elation.

  • • •

  The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite came on as Gordon and Penny were finishing dinner. She had made a soufflé and Gordon had uncorked a white Beaujolais; both were feeling quite flush. They moved into the living room to watch. Penny took off her blouse, revealing small well-shaped breasts with large nipples.

  “How do you know it’ll be on?” she asked lazily.

  “Saul called this afternoon. He did an interview in Boston this morning. The local CBS station did the work, but he said the national network picked it up. Maybe there isn’t much else going on.” He glanced around to be sure the curtains were drawn.

  “Ummm. Looks that way.” There was one big story—the nuclear powered submarine Thresher had gone down in the Atlantic without a single cry for help. They had been on a test dive. The Navy said that probably a system failure created progressive flooding. The interference with electrical circuits caused loss of power and the sub plunged to deeper waters, finally imploding. There were 129 men aboard.

  Other than this depressing news there was very little. A follow-up on the Mona Lisa exhibit which toured New York and Washington, D.C. A preview of the launch of Major L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., who was to be launched on a 22-orbit, two-day trip around the earth in Faith 7, the final flight of Project Mercury. A statement by the White House that aid to South Vietnam would continue and that the war might be won by the end of 1965 if the political crisis there did not significantly affect the military effort. Generals grinned at the camera, promising a firm effort by t
he ARVN and a short mop-up operation in the delta region. In New York, efforts to save Pennsylvania Station had failed, and the classic edifice began to fall to the wrecker’s ball to make way for the new Madison Square Garden. The Pan Am Building, dedicated a month earlier, seemed the wave of the urban-blighted future. On camera, a critic decried the fall of Perm Station and declared the Pan Am an architectural atrocity, contributing to congestion in an already crowded area. Gordon agreed. The critic closed with a wistful remark that meeting beneath the clock at the Biltmore hotel, just across the street from the Pan Am, wasn’t going to be much of a joy any more. Gordon laughed to himself without quite understanding why. His sympathies suddenly reversed. He had never met a girl at the Biltmore; that was the sort of empty WASP ritual open to Yalies and kids who identified with The Catcher in the Rye. That wasn’t his world and never had been. “If that’s the past, fuck it,” he muttered under his breath. Penny gave him a questioning glance but said nothing. He grunted impatiently. Maybe the wine was getting to him.

  Then Saul came on.

  “From Yale University this evening, a startling announcement,” Cronkite began. “Professor Saul Shriffer, an astrophysicist, says that there is a possibility that recent experiments have detected a message from a civilization beyond our Earth.”

  They switched to a shot of Saul pointing to a speck on a star chart. “The signals appear to come from the star 99 Hercules, similar to our own sun. 99 Hercules is 51 light years away. A light year is the distance—”