‘You said yourself neutrinos are hard to detect. There must be other ways to explain this, without invoking beings from the future.’
‘That’s true,’ Dan said. ‘Though if this sustains itself long enough we’re going to be able to eliminate other causes. Anyhow, that’s not all. We have enough data now to show that the gaps repeat. In a pattern.’
Malenfant growled, ‘This is new to me. A repeating pattern. A signal?’
Dan rubbed his greasy hair. ‘I don’t see what else it could be.’
‘A signal,’ said Malenfant. ‘Damn. Then Cornelius was right.’
Emma felt cold, despite the metallic stuffiness of the chamber.
Dan produced a simplified summary of several periods of the pattern, a string of black circles and white circles. ‘Look at this. The blacks are full-strength pulses, the whites half-strength. You get a string of six white. Then a break of two black. Then an irregular pattern for twelve pulses. Then two black, six white, and a break. Then another set of twelve black-whites, “framed” by the two black and six white combination. I think we’re seeing delimiters around these two strings of twelve pulses. And this is what repeats: over and over. Sometimes there are minor differences, but we think that’s caused by the experimental uncertainty.’
Malenfant said, ‘If it’s a signal, what does it mean?’
Emma said, ‘Binary numbers. The signals are binary numbers.’
They both turned to her.
Malenfant said, ‘Huh? Binary numbers? Why?’
She smiled, exhausted, jetlag-disoriented. ‘Because signals like this always are.’
Dan was nodding. ‘Yes. Right. I should have thought of that. We have to learn to think like Cornelius. The downstreamers know us. Maybe they are us, our future selves. And they know we’ll expect binary.’ He grabbed a pad and scribbled out two strings of 1 and 0:
1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1
0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0
He sat back. ‘There.’
Malenfant squinted. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’
Emma found herself laughing. ‘Maybe it’s a Carl Sagan picture. A waving downstreamer.’ Shut up, Emma.
‘No,’ Dan said. ‘It’s too simple for that. They have to be numbers.’ He cleared his softscreen and began tapping in a simple conversion program. After a couple of minutes, he had it running.
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6
They stared. Malenfant said, ‘What do they mean?’
Dan began to feed the raw neutrino counts through his conversion program, and the converted signals – live, as they were received in the film-emulsion detector – scrolled steadily up the screen.
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6 3 7 5 3 1 9 8 6 3 7 5 3 1 9 8 6
‘Someone should call Cornelius,’ Dan said. ‘And –’
Malenfant said, ‘What?’
‘We only ran for a week before we picked this up. How did the downstreamers know when we were ready, when to switch on?’
Malenfant grinned. ‘Because they already knew when we’d be here.’
Emma didn’t share his evident glee at this result.
She felt dwarfed. She imagined the world wheeling around her, spinning as it carried her through darkness around the sun, around the rim of the Galaxy – and the Galaxy itself sailing off to its own remote destination, stars glimmering like the windows of a great ocean liner …
Messages from the future. Could it be true? – that there were beings, far beyond this place and time, trying to signal to the past, to her, through this lashed-up physics equipment?
Was Cornelius right? Right about everything? Right, too, about the Carter catastrophe, the coming extinction of them all?
It couldn’t be true. It was insanity. An infection of schizophrenia from Cornelius, that was damaging them all.
Malenfant, of course, was hooked. She knew him well enough to understand he would be unable to resist this new adventure, wherever it took him.
And how, she wondered, was she going to be able to persuade him to do any work at all, after this?
3 7 5 3
1 9 8 6 3 7 5 3 1 9 8 6 …
Reid Malenfant:
The puzzle of the Feynman radio message nagged at Malenfant, even as he threw himself into his myriad other projects. He would write out the numbers on a pad, or have them scroll up on a softscreen. He tried taking the numbers apart: factorizing them, multiplying them, dividing one by the other.
He got nowhere.
Cornelius Taine was equally frustrated. He would call Malenfant at odd time-zoned hours. Mathematics, even numerology, must be the wrong approach.
‘Why?’
What do you know about math, Malenfant? Remember the nature of the signal we’re dealing with here. Remember that the downstreamers are trying to communicate with us – specifically, with you.
‘Me?’
Yes. You’re the decision-maker here. There has to be some simple meaning in these numbers for you. Just look at the numbers, Cornelius urged. Don’t think too hard. What do they look like?
1 9 8 6
3 7 5 3
‘Umm, 1986 could be a date.’
A date?
1986: the year of Challenger and Chernobyl, a first overseas posting for a young pilot called Reid Malenfant. ‘It wasn’t the happiest year in history, but nothing so special for me … Hey. Cornelius. Could 3753 also represent a date?’ His skin prickled. ‘The 38th century – Christ, Cornelius, maybe that’s the true date of the Carter catastrophe.’
Cornelius’s softscreen image, slightly blurred, showed him frowning. It’s possible, but any date after a couple of centuries is very unlikely. Anything else?
‘No. Keep thinking, Cornelius.’
Yes…
And Malenfant would roll up the softscreen and return to his work, or try to sleep.
Until
