he was the dispassionate seeker of truth. But gradually the effort of sticking to this low-key role showed. He couldn’t prove rigorously that his approximation was justified, so he was reduced to a holding action. In sum his approach amounted to a repeated invitation to “prove that I’m wrong.” Gradually, his voice rose. His face tightened into stubbornness.
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—
“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
“How in hell does an extraterrestrial know our system of astronomical measurements?” Gordon said skeptically.
“How do they know our
“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
“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
“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.”
