“Like a goddamned code,” Cooper finished. Cooper wiped at his mouth and stared at the
“Do you know Morse code?” Gordon asked him quietly. “I don’t.”
“Well, yeah. I did when I was a kid, anyway.”
“Let’s lay out these sheets, in the order I took the data.” Gordon stood up with renewed energy. He picked the broken pencil off the floor and inserted it in a pencil sharpener and started turning the handle. It made a raw, grinding noise.
When Isaac Lakin came into the nuclear resonance laboratory anyone, even a casual visitor, could tell it was his. Of course, the National Science Foundation paid for essentially all of it, except the war surplus electronics gear acquired from the Navy, and the University of California owned the immense pancake magnets under a Grantor’s Assignment, but in any useful sense of the term the laboratory belonged to Isaac Lakin. He had established his reputation at MIT in a decade of sound work, research occasionally flecked by the sparkle of real brilliance. From there he had gone to General Electric and Bell Labs, each step taking him higher. When the University of California began building a new campus around the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Lakin became one of their first “finds.” He had the contacts in Washington and brought a big chunk of money with him, money that translated into gear and lab space and slots for junior faculty. Gordon had been one of the first to fill those slots, but from the beginning he and Lakin had failed to hit it off. When Lakin came into Gordon’s lab he usually found something out of place, a snarl of wires that almost tripped him, a dewar poorly secured, something that soured his mood.
Lakin nodded to Cooper and murmured a hello to Gordon, his eyes scanning the lab. Gordon quickly led Lakin through a summary of their process of elimination. Lakin nodded, smiling faintly, as Cooper then detailed the weeks he had spent checking and rechecking the rig. As Cooper went on Lakin drifted away, thumbing a knob here, studying a circuit there.
“These leads are reversed,” he declared, holding up wiring with alligator clips attached.
“That unit we aren’t using anyway,” Gordon replied mildly. Lakin studied Cooper’s circuitry, made a remark about assemblying it better, and moved on. Cooper’s voice followed him around the large laboratory bay. To Cooper, describing an experiment was like field-stripping a rifle, each part in its place and as necessary as any other. He was good and he was careful, but he hadn’t the experience to go for the throat of a problem, Gordon saw, to give only the essentials. Well, that was why Cooper was a student and Lakin a full professor.
Lakin flipped a switch, studied the dancing face of an oscilloscope, and said, “Something’s out of alignment.”
Cooper scurried into action. He tracked down the snag, setting it right in a few moments. Lakin nodded in approval. Gordon felt a curious tightness in his chest ease, as though it had been himself being tested, not Cooper.
“Very well, then,” Lakin said finally. “Your results?”
Now it was Gordon’s turn to perform. He chalk-talked his way through their ideas, followed them up with the data displays. He gave Cooper credit for guessing there was a, coded message in the noise. He picked up a recorder sheet and showed it to Lakin, pointing out the spacings and how they were always close to either one centimeter or 0.5 centimeters, never anything else.
Lakin studied the jittery lines with their occasional sharp points, like towers jutting up through a fog-shrouded cityscape. Impassively he said, “Nonsense.”
Gordon paused. “I thought so, too, at first. Then we decoded the thing, assigning the 0.5 centimeter intervals as ‘short’ and one centimeter as ‘long’ in Morse code.”
“This is pointless. There is no physical effect which could produce data like these.” Lakin glanced around at Cooper, clearly exasperated.
“But look at a translation from the Morse,” Gordon said, scribbling on the blackboard. ENZYME INHIBITED B.
Lakin squinted at the letters. “This is from one sheet of recorder paper?” “Well, no. Three together.” “Where were the breaks?”
“ENZYM on the first, E INHIB on the second, ITED B on the third.”
“So you haven’t got a complete word at all.”
“Well, they
“How long?”
“Oh… twenty seconds.”
“Time enough for several of your ‘letters’ to go by undetected.”
“Well, maybe. But the structure—”
“There is no structure here, merely guesswork.”
Gordon frowned. “The chances of getting a set of words out of random noise, arranged this way—”
“How do you space the words?” Lakin said. “Even in Morse de there’s an interval, to tell you where one word stops and another begins.”
“Doctor Lakin, that’s just what we’ve found. There are two-centimeter intervals on the recordings between each word. That fits—”
“I see.” Lakin took all this stoically. “Quite convenient. Are there other… messages?”
“Some,” Gordon said evenly. “They don’t make a great deal of sense.”
“I suspected as much.”
“Oh, there are words. ‘This’ and ‘saturate’—what are the odds against getting an eight-letter word like that, offset on each side with two-centimeter spacings?”
“Ummm,” Lakin said, shrugging. Gordon always had the feeling that at such moments Lakin had some expression in his native language, Hungarian, but couldn’t translate it into English. “I still believe it to be… nonsense. There is no physical effect such as this. Interference from outside, yes. I can believe that. But this, this James Bond Morse code—no.”
With that Lakin shook his head quickly, as though erasing the matter, and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I think you have wasted your time here.”
“I don’t really—”
“My advice to you is to focus on your true problem. That is to find the source of noise in your electronics. I fail to understand why you cannot seek it out.” Lakin turned, nodded to Cooper curtly, and was gone.
An hour after Lakin had left, after the equipment was turned off or cycled down, the data collected, the lab books compiled and details filled in, Gordon waved goodbye to Cooper and walked out into the long corridor leading to the outside. He was surprised; the glass doors showed gathering gloom, and Venus rising. Gordon had assumed it was still late afternoon. The frosted glass in each office door was black; everyone had gone home, even Shelly, whom he’d counted on talking to.
Well then, tomorrow. There was always time tomorrow, Gordon thought. He walked down the corridor woodenly, lurching to the side as his briefcase banged against a knee. The labs were in the basement of the new physics building. Because of the slope of the shoreline hills, this end of the building gave out onto flat land. Beyond the glass doors at the end of the corridor night crouched, a black square. Gordon felt that the telescoping hallway was swimming past him, and realized that he was more tired than he thought. He really ought to get more exercise, stay in shape.
As he watched, Penny stepped into the framed darkness and pushed through.
“Oh,” he said, staring at her blankly. He remembered that he had mumbled a promise this morning to come home early and make supper. “Oh damn.”
“Yes. I finally got tired of waiting.”
“God, I’m sorry, I, I just…” He made a gawky gesture. The plain fact was that he had completely forgotten, but it didn’t seem wise to say that.
“Honey, you get too wrapped up.” Her voice softened as she studied his face.
“Weil, I know, I… I’m really sorry, God I am…” He thought, self-accusingly,
