Timescape

itself, seems like. Makes some pretty lethal side products, too—chlorinated benzenes, polychlorinated biphenyls, all kinds of crap. Have a squint at this.”

A photograph, produced with a flourish from a folder. A lean fish on a concrete slab, eyes glazed. Its lips bulged, green and laced with filaments of blue. A pale sore beneath the gills.

“Lip cancers, assymetries, tumors—Hussinger turned white when he saw what it did to his sample stock. See, he usually doesn’t worry about pathogens getting into the troughs. Sea water is cold and salty. It kills disease-carriers, all except some…”

Gordon noticed the pause. “Except what?”

“Except some viruses, Hussinger said.”

“Uh huh. ‘Virus imprinting.’ And these fish—”

“Hussinger isolated my troughs and stopped it. All my sample fish died.”

The two men stared at each other. “I wonder who’s using it down in the Amazon,” Ramsey said softly.

“Russians?” The possibility now seemed quite real to Gordon.

“Where’s the strategic advantage?”

“Maybe it’s some kind of accident.”

“I dunno… You still don’t know why you’re getting this over your NMR rig?”

“No.”

“That Saul Shriffer crap—”

Gordon waved it away. “Not my idea. Forget it.”

“We can’t forget this.” Ramsey held up the fish photo.

“No, we can’t.”

“Hussinger wants to publish right away.”

“Go ahead.”

“You sure this isn’t a DOD thing you’re working on?”

“No, look—that was your idea.”

“You didn’t knock it down.”

“Let’s say I didn’t want to expose my source. You can see what happened when Shriffer got hold of it.”

“Yeah.” Ramsey peered at him, a distant and assessing look. “You’re pretty sly.”

Gordon thought this was unfair. “You brought up the DOD angle. I said nothing.”

“Okay, okay Tricky, though.”

Gordon wondered if Ramsey was thinking to himself, Shifty Jew. But he caught himself as he thought it. Christ, what paranoia. He was getting to sound like his mother, always sure the goyim were out to get you.

“Sorry about that,” Gordon said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t, well…”

“Hey, that’s okay. No big deal. Hell, you put me onto a fantastic thing. Really important.”

Ramsey tapped the photograph. Both men stared at it, reflecting. A silence fell between them. The fish’s lips were swollen balloons, the colors horribly out of place. In the quiet Gordon heard the lab outside the small office. The regular chugging and ticking went on unmindful of the two men, rhythms and forces, voices. Nucleic acids sought each other in the capillaries of glass. An acid smell cut the air. Enameled light descended. Ticktock ticktock.

•  •  •

Saul Shriffer gazed out from the cover of Life with a casual self-confidence, arm draped over a Palomar telescope mount. Inside, the story was titled BATTLING EXOBIOLOGIST. There were pictures of Saul peering at a photograph of Venus, Saul inspecting a model of Mars, Saul at the control panel of the Green Bank radio telescope. One paragraph dealt with the NMR message. Beside the big magnets stood Saul, with Gordon in the background. Gordon was looking into the space between the magnet poles, apparently doing nothing. Saul’s hand hovered near some wiring, about to fix it. The NMR signals were described as “controversial” and “strongly doubted by most astronomers.” Saul was quoted: “You take some chances in this field. Sometimes you lose. Them’s the breaks.”

•  •  •

“Gordon, your name is in here once. That’s all,” Penny said.

“The article’s about Saul, remember.”

“But that’s why he’s in here. He’s riding on your…”

Mocking: “My success.”

“Well, no, but…”

•  •  •

Gordon tossed the drawing on Ramsey’s desk. “Did I give you a copy of this?”

Ramsey picked it up and wrinkled his brow. “No. What is it?”

“Another part of the signal.”

“Oh yeah, I remember. It was on TV.”

“Right. Shriffer showed it.”

Ramsey studied the interweaving curves. “Y’know, I didn’t think anything of this at the time. But…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it looks like some sort of molecular chain to me. These dots…”

“The ones I connected up?”

“Yeah, I guess. You drew this first?”

“No, Saul unscrambled it from a coded sequence. What about them?”

“Well, maybe it’s not a bunch of curves. Maybe the points are molecules. Or atoms. Nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorus.”

“Like in DNA.”

“Well, this isn’t DNA. More complicated.”

“More complicated, or more complex?”

“Crap, I don’t know. What’s the difference?”

“You think it has some relation to those long-chain molecules?”

“Could be.”

“Those in-house names. Dupont and Springsomething.”

“Dupont Analagan 58. Springfield AD45.”

“Could this be one of those?”

“Those products don’t exist, I told you.”

“Okay, okay. But could they be that kind of thing?”

“Maybe. Maybe. Look, why don’t I see if I can figure this thing out.”

“How?”

“Well, try assigning atoms to the sites in the chains. See what works.”

“The way Crick and Watson did DNA?”

“Well, yeah, something like that.”

“Great. Maybe that’ll unravel some of—”

“Don’t count on it. Look, the important thing is the experiment. The oxygen loss, the fish. Hussinger and I are going to publish that right away.”

“Good, fine, and—”

“You don’t mind?”

“Huh? Why?”

“I mean, Hussinger says he thinks we should publish it together. If you and I want to do a paper on the message and its content; Hussinger says, that’s another—”

“Oh, I see.” Gordon rocked back in his chair. He felt worn down.

“I mean, I don’t go along with him on that one, but…”

“No, never mind. I don’t care. Publish it, for Chrissakes.”

“You don’t mind?”

“All I did was say, look into it. So you looked and you found something. Good.”