Timescape

“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.

“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