sample, cooled down to 3 degrees absolute in the bubbling helium, were atomic nuclei. Each was a tiny
The jagged traces before him, though, were neither simple nor beautiful. Here and there were fragments of what they should be getting: nuclear resonance curves, smooth and meaningful. But in most of the gridded traces there were sudden jagged line bursts of electromagnetic noise, appearing abruptly for an instant, then disappearing just as suddenly.
“The same spacings,” Gordon murmured.
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “The one-centimeter ones—” he pointed “—and the shorter ones, half a centimeter. Regular as hell.”
Both men looked at each other, then back at the data. Each had hoped for a different result. They had done these experiments over again and again, eliminating all possible sources of noise. The ragged bursts would not vanish.
“It’s a goddam message,” Cooper said. “Must be.”
Gordon nodded, fatigue seeping through him. “There’s no avoiding it,” he said. “We’ve got hours of signal here. Can’t be coincidence, not this much.”
“No.”
“Okay then,” Gordon said, summoning up optimism in his voice. “Let’s decode the fucking thing.”
REDUCTION OF OXYGEN CONTENT TO BELOW TWO PARTS PER MILLION WITHIN FIFTY KILOMETER RADIUS OF SOURCE AFTER DIATOM BLOOM MANIFESTS AEMRUDYCO PEZQEASKL MINOR POLLUTANTS PRESENT IN DEITRICH POLYXTROPE 174A ONE SEVEN FOUR A COMBINES IN LATTITINE CHAIN WITH HERBICIDES SPRINGFIELD AD45 AD FOUR FIVE OR DU PONT ANALAGAN 58 FIVE EIGHT EMITTING FROM REPEATED AGRICULTURAL USE AMAZON BASIN OTHER SITES OTHER LONG CHAIN MOLECULAR SYNERGISTS POSSIBLE IN TROPICAL ENVIRONS OXYGEN COLUMN SUBJECT TO CONVECTIVE SPREADING RATE ALZSNRUD ASMA WSUEXIO 829 CMXDROQ VIRUS IMPRINTING STAGE RESULTS 3 THREE WEEK DELAY IF DENSITY OF SPRINGFIELD AD45 AD FOUR FIVE EXCEEDS 158 ONE FIVE EIGHT PARTS PER MILLION THEN ENTERS MOLECULAR SIMULATION REGIME BEGINS IMITATING HOST CAN THEN CONVERT PLANKTON NEURO JACKET INTO ITS OWN CHEMICAL FORM USING AMBIENT OXYGEN CONTENT UNTIL OXYGEN LEVEL FALLS TO VALUES FATAL TO MOST OF THE HIGHER FOOD CHAIN WTESJDKU AGAIN AMMA YS ACTION OF ULTRAVIOLET SUNLIGHT ON CHAINS APPEARS TO RETARD DIFFUSION IN SURFACE LAYERS OF THE OCEAN BUT GROWTH CONTINUES LOWER DOWN DESPITE CONVECTIVE CELLS FORMING WHICH TEND TO MIX LAYERS IN XMC AHSU URGENT MADUDLO 374 ONLY SEGMENT AMZLSOUDP ALYN YOU MUST STOP ABOVE NAMED SUBSTANCES FROM ENTERING OCEAN LIFE CHAIN AMZSUY RDUCDK BY PROHIBITIONS OF FOLLOWING SUBSTANCES CALLANAN B471 FOUR SEVEN ONE MESTOFITE SALEN MARINE COMPOUND ALPHA THROUGH DELTA YDEMCLW URGENT YXU CONDUCT TITRATION ANALYSIS ON METASTABLE INGREDIENTS PWMXSJR ALSUDNCH
Gordon had no chance to think about the message until the afternoon. His morning was filled out by a lecture and then a committee meeting on graduate student admissions. There were top-flight students applying from all over—Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford. The canonical seats of wisdom. A few unusual cases—two odd ones from Oklahoma who might be promising, a gifted and quiet fellow from Long Beach State—were put aside for study. It was plain that La Jolla’s fame was spreading rapidly. In part it was the continuing heady rush of the Sputnik phenomenon. Gordon was riding that wave himself, and he knew it; these were ripe times for science. He wondered, though, about the students just now coming into physics. Some of them seemed like the same sort that went into law or medicine—not because it was a fascinating subject, but because it promised big bucks. Gordon wondered privately whether Cooper had elements of that; the man showed sparks of the old flame, but it lay hidden beneath a blanket of mellow relaxation, an aura of physical assurance. Even the message, the very existence of a message, struck Cooper as a little funny but basically acceptable, an odd effect, soon to be explained. Gordon could not tell whether this was a pose or genuine serenity; either way, it was unsettling. Gordon was used to a more intense style. He envied the physicists who had made the great discoveries when quantum mechanics was unfolding, when the nucleus first shattered. The older members of the department, Eckart and Lieberman, talked of those days sometimes. Before the 1940s, a degree in physics was a solid basis for a career in electrical engineering, period. The bomb had changed all that. In the avalanche of gaudy weapons, new fields of study, increased budgets, and expanding horizons, everyone discovered suddenly a national thirst for physicists. In the years following Hiroshima a newspaper story referring to a physicist invariably called him “the brilliant nuclear physicist,” as though there could be no other kind. Physics got fatter. Even so, physicists were still relatively poorly paid; Gordon could remember a visiting professor at Columbia borrowing money to attend the Friday “Chinese lunch” Lee and Yang had started up. The lunches met in one of the excellent Chinese restaurants ringing the campus, and it was there that new results often surfaced first. Attendance was a good idea if you wanted to keep up. So the visiting scholar had scrounged enough to go, and paid it back within a week. Such days seemed distant to Gordon now, though they must loom large in the minds of the older physicists, he realized. Some, like Lakin, carried an air of uneasy waiting, as though the bubble would soon burst. The dazed public, with its short attention span, would be distracted by the cornucopia of tail fins and ranch-style tract homes, and forget about science. The easy equation—science equals engineering equals consumer yummies—would fade. Physics had spent more time at the bottom of the S curve than chemistry—World War I was the flush time for them—and now was enjoying the steep climb. But a plateau had to follow. The S curve had to curl over.
Gordon mulled this over as he made his way from the laboratory up the outside stairs to Lakin’s office. The lab notebooks were carefully organized and he had checked over the decoding of the message repeatedly. Still, he was of half a mind to turn around and avoid seeing Lakin at all.
He was only a few sentences into his presentation when Lakin said, “Really, Gordon, I had trusted you would fix this trouble by now.”
“Isaac, these are the facts.”
“No.” The trimly built man got up from behind his desk and began to pace. “I have looked into your experiment in detail. I read your notes—Cooper showed me where they were.”
Gordon frowned. “Why not ask me for them?”
“You were in class. And—I speak frankly—I wanted to see Cooper’s own entries, in his own hand.”
“Why?”
“You admit you did not take all the data by yourself.”
“No, of course not. He’s got to do something for a thesis.”
“And he is behind schedule, yes. Significantly behind.” Lakin stopped and made one of his characteristic movements, dipping his head slightly and raising his eyebrows as he looked at Gordon, as though gazing over the rims of nonexistent eyeglasses. Gordon supposed this was a glance meant to convey something unprovable but obvious, an unspoken understanding between colleagues.
“I don’t think he’s faking it, if that’s what you mean,” he said very steadily, keeping inflection out of his voice with some effort.
“How could you tell?”
“The data I took fits in with the syntax of the rest of the message.”
“That could be a deliberate effect, somehow cooked up by Cooper.” Lakin turned toward the window, hands clasped behind his back, his voice now carrying a shade of hesitation.
“Come
Lakin suddenly rounded on him. “Very
“We have an effect, but no explanation. That’s what’s going on. Nothing more.” He waved the page of
