these things. A distant war could roll across an ocean and crash on this shore. He thought muzzily to Scripps Pier, which jutted out below the campus, used as a loading dock for men and tanks and munitions. But then he snorted to himself, sure the drink was now fuzzing his mind. Around him the tight pocket of La Jolla could not be threatened by a bunch of little guys running around in black pajamas, trying to topple the Diem government. It didn’t make any goddamn sense. He turned back toward home and Penny. It was easy to get overexcited about threats—Cliff, the Cong, Lakin. Waves could not batter down a coastline overnight. And dim ideas about Cubans dumping fertilizer into the Atlantic and killing the life there—yeah, it was all too unlikely, more of his paranoia, yeah, he was sure of that tonight.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GORDON OPENED THE
“Here’s the new stuff,” Cooper said at his elbow.
Gordon took the data sheets. “More signal?”
“Yep,” Cooper said flatly. “I’ve been getting good resonance curves for weeks now, and all of a sudden— whacko.”
“You decoded it?”
“Sure. A lot of repetition in it, for some reason.”
Gordon followed Cooper over to Cooper’s working area, where the lab notebooks were spread out. He found himself hoping the results would be nonsense, simply interference. It would be much easier that way. He wouldn’t have to worry about any messages, Cooper could proceed on his thesis, Lakin would be happy. His life didn’t need any complication right now, and he had hoped the whole spontaneous resonance effect would go away. Their
His hopes faded as he studied Cooper’s blocky printing.
TRANSWBPRY 7 FROM CL998 CAMBE19983ZX
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
The mystifying chant of letters and numbers ran on for three pages. Then it abruptly stopped and there followed:
SHOULD APPEAR AS POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM 263 KEV PEAK CAN VERIFY WITH NMR DIRECTIONALITY MEASUREMENT FOLLOWS ZPASUZC AKSOWLP BREAKDOWN IN RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS SMISSION FROM 19BD 1998COORGHQE
After this came nothing sensible. Gordon studied Cooper’s data. “The rest of this stuff looks like simple on and off. No code to it.” Cooper nodded, and scratched his leg beneath his cutaway jeans shorts. “Just dots and dashes,” Gordon muttered to himself. “Funny” Cooper nodded again. Gordon had noticed lately that Cooper now confined himself to taking the data and venturing no opinions. Perhaps the clash with Lakin had taught him that an agnostic posture was safer. Cooper seemed happy enough when he was getting conventional resonance signals; they were the field stones which would build his thesis.
“This earlier stuff—RA and DEC” Gordon stroked his chin. “Something astronomical about that…”
“Ummmm,” Cooper volunteered. “Maybe so.”
“Yes—Right Ascension and Declination. These are
“Huh. Could be.”
Gordon glanced at Cooper irritably. There was such a thing as playing cards too close to your vest. “Look, I want to look into this. Just keep on taking measurements.”
Cooper nodded and turned away, obviously relieved to be rid of the perplexing data. Gordon left the lab and went up two floors to 317, Bernard Carroway’s office. There was no answer to his knock. He went by the department office, leaned in and called, “Joyce, where is Dr. Carroway?” By convention, office personnel were called by their first names, while faculty always had a title. Gordon had always felt slightly uncomfortable about going along with the practice.
“The big one or the little one?” the dark-haired department secretary said, raising her eyebrows; she scarcely ever let them rest.
“Big one. In mass, not height.”
“Astrophysics seminar. It should be nearly over.”
He slipped quietly into the seminar as John Boyle was finishing a lecture; the green blackboards were covered with differential equations from Boyle’s new gravitation theory. Boyle finished with a flourish, mixing in a Scotsman’s joke, and the seminar broke up into rivulets of conversation. Bernard Carroway heaved himself up and led a discussion between Boyle and a third man Gordon didn’t know. He leaned over and asked Bob Gould, “Who’s that?” Gordon nodded at the tall, curly-haired man.
“Him? Saul Shriffer, from Yale. He and Frank Drake did that Project Ozma thing, listening for radio signals from other civilizations.”
“Oh.” Gordon leaned back and watched Shriffer argue with Boyle over a technical point. He felt a humming energy in himself, the scent of the hunt. He had put aside the whole matter of the messages for several months, in the face of Lakin’s indifference and the disappearance of the effect. But now it was back and he was suddenly sure he should press the issue.
Boyle and Shriffer were arguing over the validity of an approximation John had made to simplify an equation. Gordon watched with interest. It wasn’t a cool intellectual discourse between men of reason, as the layman so often pictured. It was a warming argument, with muted shouts and gestures. They were arguing over ideas, but beneath the surface personalities clashed. Shriffer was much the noisier of the two. He pressed down hard with the chalk, snapping it in two. He flapped his arms, shrugged, frowned. He wrote and talked rapidly, frequently refuting what he himself had been saying only moments before. He made careless mistakes in the calculation, repairing them as he went with swipes of an eraser. The trivial errors weren’t important—he was trying to capture the essence of the problem. The exact solution could come later. His hasty scrawl covered the board.
Boyle was totally different. He spoke with an even, almost monotonous voice, in contrast to the quick, jabbing tone Gordon remembered from the Limehouse. This was his scientific persona. Occasionally his voice was pitched so low Gordon had to strain to hear him. Those nearby would have to stop their side-talk to listen—a neat tactic to insure their attention. He never interrupted Shriffer. He began his sentences with “I think if we try this…” or “Saul, don’t you see what will happen if…” A form of oneupmanship. He never made a forceful, positive assertion;
