The Hercules Text Read online

  “These are the only clothes I have,” she said, breaking into a run. They’d gone a few steps when a downpour rolled over them. Julie stopped momentarily and, overcome by sudden uncontrollable laughter, pulled off her shoes.

  “The pump house!” said Harry, striking off toward the old shed.

  They ran. The rain hammered into the soil, and its roar blended with the sullen moan of the tide. The lights of the novitiate, which had been high in the trees, disappeared. Harry crashed into a wet branch that knocked him over; but Julie saved him from going down, and they burst moments later into the dry interior of the pump house.

  “I don’t think,” she said breathlessly, surveying her dress, “I’ve got much left to save.” A long strip of it hung from her right shoulder. “Did you arrange this, too?” she asked.

  They were standing on some loosely placed boards over a clay floor. A rusting spade leaned against one wall, and a couple of buckets lay in a corner near a pile of burlap. Harry pulled off his wool sweater, which was full of water. “If this is what it would have taken,” he said.

  “We can’t stay here long. Or we’ll spend the rest of the weekend in the hospital.”

  The rain beat savagely on the roof. “It can’t keep up long like this,” Harry said. “When it lets up, we’ll make a run for the lodge. Meantime, you’d better get out of that outfit. It’s soaked.” He hung his sweater over the handle of the standing spade and tossed her two pieces of burlap.

  Her tongue pushed at the inside of her cheek, in the gesture she reserved for inept car salesmen. Then she smiled and unbuckled her belt.

  The incoming shift was expected to be no less than fifteen minutes early. Linda Barrister was usually reliable, but she’d had a big night with an old flame in town, had gone to dinner and a movie, and the time had gotten away from her. The other member of her shift, Eliot Camberson, was at his station when she arrived, bleary-eyed and apologetic, more than an hour late.

  Camberson was the youngest of the communications specialists. He wasn’t much more than a kid, really, tall, freckled, exceedingly serious about his job, inclined to excesses of enthusiasm. On this night, he surprised her.

  “Linda,” he said, with an amused casualness she found hard to credit later, “it’s back.”

  “What is?” she asked, misled by his tone.

  “The signal.”

  She looked at him, then glanced at the overhead monitor. Camberson flipped a switch, and they got sound: a staccato buzzing like an angry bee. “Jesus,” she said. “You’re right. How long ago?”

  “While you were taking off your coat.” He looked down at his console. “But it’s not the pulsar.”

  MONITOR

  ATTACK DOG FIRMS INDICTED

  Cranking Out “Pussy Cats,” State Charges

  Demand Continues High

  HURRICANE BECKY SLAMS INTO GALVESTON

  Damage in Millions; Hurley Declares Emergency

  WHITE HOUSE DENIES THERE WAS SECOND SIGNAL

  BOMB EXPLODES IN LEBANESE BUS TERMINAL

  4 Dead; Christian Alliance Blamed

  TWO MORE INDICTED IN PENTAGON SPY CASE

  First Test of Peacetime Death Penalty Expected

  HOUSING STARTS UP AGAIN

  Dow Breaks through 2500 Barrier

  Retailers, Technology Stocks Lead Surge

  GM UNVEILS SPECTER

  Laser Replaces Gasoline Engine

  TRENTON PLUMBER BEGINS WALK ACROSS U.S.

  “I Love this Country,” He Says

  Hopes To Arrive in L.A. by Christmas

  “LOVE IN THE STARS” HITS

  TOP OF CHARTS IN FIRST WEEK

  HURLEY REFUSES TO DEAL

  WITH TERRORISTS IN NUCLEAR PLANT

  Denies Plan to Keep Crisis Secret

  Will Not Evacuate South Jersey

  But People Are Leaving Anyway

  COWBOYS LOSE FIRST

  6

  AT APPROXIMATELY 7:00 A.M., Harry delivered his wife to her cousin’s split-level, three-quarters of a mile from home, and accepted a brief kiss from her. It was perhaps the bitterest moment of his life.

  When he arrived, late, at his office, the phones were busy with reaction to the press conference. Four student aides had come in to help out. His desk was piled high with telegrams. Calls were coming in from people from whom he hadn’t heard in years. Old friends, colleagues with whom he’d worked in Treasury before coming over to NASA, and even a brother-in-law who had apparently not yet heard about his domestic troubles overwhelmed the phones to congratulate him. His mood soared, for the first time, it seemed, in many months; and he was beaming when he got to Ed Gambini’s message.

  “Please call,” it said. “Something’s happened.”

  Harry didn’t bother with the phone.

  The operations center was bedlam. Extra technicians and investigators were gathered around monitors, laughing and pushing one another. Majeski waved a scroll of printout paper in his direction and shouted something Harry couldn’t hear over the noise. In Harry’s memory, it was the only time Gambini’s assistant had actually looked pleased to see him.

  Leslie was in ADP, bent over a computer. When she straightened, he caught an expression on her face of such pure uninhibited joy that she might have been approaching orgasm. (Julie would never have permitted such a display outside a bedroom.)

  “What’s going on?” he asked a technician. She pointed at the TDRSS monitor. Assorted keyboard characters were flashing across the screen in rapid succession. “About one this morning,” she said, her voice pitched high with excitement. “It’s been coming in ever since.”

  “One-oh-nine, to be exact.” Gambini pounded Harry on the shoulder. “The little bastards came through, Harry!” His face glowed with pleasure. “We lost the acquisition signal on September 20 at four-thirty A.M. We get the second signal on November 11, at one-oh-nine A.M. Figure in the change to standard time, and they’re still operating on multiples of Gamma’s orbital period. Eighteen and an eighth this time.”

  “The pulsar’s back?”

  “No, not the pulsar. Something else: we’re getting a radio wave. It’s spread pretty much across the lower bands, but it seems to be centered at sixteen hundred sixty-two megahertz. The first hydroxyl line. Harry, it’s an ideal frequency for long-range communication. But their transmitter—my God, our most conservative estimate is that they’re putting out a one and a half million megawatt signal. It’s hard to conceive of a controlled radio pulse with that kind of power.”

  “Why would they abandon the pulsar?”

  “For better definition. They’ve got our attention, so they’ve switched to a more sophisticated system.”

  Their eyes locked. “Son of a bitch!” said Harry. “It’s really happening!”

  “Yes,” said Gambini. “It really is.”

  Angela bounced into Harry’s arms, pulled his head down, and kissed him. “Welcome to the party,” she said.

  Her lips were warm and enthusiastic; Harry disengaged himself with reluctance and patted her paternally on the shoulder. “Ed, can we read any of it?”

  “It’s too soon. But they know what we need to begin translating.”

  “They’re using a binary system,” said Angela.

  “There’re a couple of mathematicians we need to bring in, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to get Hakluyt down here as well.”

  “We’d better notify Rosenbloom.”

  “It’s already done.” Gambini smirked. “I’ll be interested in hearing what he has to say now.”

  “Not one word.” Rosenbloom glowered at his desktop. “Not one goddam word until I tell you!”

  “We can’t hide this,” said Gambini, his voice trembling. “There are too many people who deserve to know.”

  Harry nodded. “It makes me uncomfortable, too,” he said. “And the government is going to look like hell to the rest of the world.”

  “No!” Rosenbloom overflowed the chair behind his oak desk. He grunted softly and push
ed himself out of it. He wasn’t much taller standing than he was sitting. “It probably won’t take long, but until we get clearance, I don’t want any of this to get out. Do you understand?”

  “Quint.” Gambini stifled his rage as best he could. “If we do this, if we hold this back, my career, Wheeler’s career, the careers of all our people will be finished. Listen: we aren’t employees of the government; we’re here on contract. But if we participate in this, we can expect to become persona non grata. Everywhere.”

  “Careers? You’re talking to me about careers? There are bigger stakes here than where you’ll be working ten years from now. Look, Ed, how can we announce the second transmission unless we’re prepared to release the transmission itself? And we can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” demanded Gambini.

  “Because the White House says we can’t. Hell, Ed, we don’t know what might be in there. Maybe the makings for some home-brew plague, or weather control, or God knows what.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? When we know that, you can release the goddam thing. But not till then. You’ll be interested in knowing, by the way, that the Russians have launched a crash program to put up a SKYNET of their own.”

  “It’ll take them years,” said Gambini.

  “Yeah.” Rosenbloom rubbed his hands together. “Meantime, we have Hercules to ourselves. And the question we have to decide is what we want to recommend to the White House. We seem to have two unpalatable choices. We can suggest they ride things out and say nothing, or admit what they’ve got and withhold the transmission. Which would you rather do?”

  Gambini looked desolate.

  “Listen,” said Rosenbloom, “I know we’re asking a sacrifice. But think about it: suppose we release everything we have and there’s information in there that would make a first strike feasible, that would guarantee complete destruction of an enemy with no chance for retaliation. Maybe a technique for negating radar, for example. I can think of all kinds of possibilities. Would you want them loose in the world? Would you?”

  “How about,” suggested Harry coldly, “if we just shut SKYNET down? Stop listening? Wouldn’t that simplify things?”

  He caught a withering stare from Gambini, but Rosenbloom looked receptive. “I’ve thought that right from the start.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Gambini wore an expression of utter contempt. “I don’t deny there’s a risk,” he said. “But your concerns are farfetched. Has it occurred to you that there’s also a risk in allowing the Russians to suspect we have exclusive access to that kind of information? God knows what kind of meetings have been going on in the Kremlin since the press conference yesterday.”

  “I think,” said the Director, “there’s already been some consideration given to that. You may’ve noticed we’ve begun beefing up security. The White House is sending some people over. I hear, by the way, that Maloney’s pushing to get the entire Hercules operation moved out of here and sent to Fort Meade.” Maloney was the White House special assistant for national security, a thin, waspish man whom Harry had met on two occasions and had thoroughly disliked.

  “That makes no sense!” objected Gambini. “The National Security Agency isn’t set up for this kind of operation.”

  “Why not? There’s going to be concern about security. Probably a lot more after the President’s had a chance to think about it.”

  “But all our equipment is here.”

  “I doubt there’s much here that NSA doesn’t have a better model of, or that can’t be moved.”

  “There’d probably be some trouble with clearances,” said Harry. “They don’t let anybody in over there without fairly extensive investigation. It’d take time.”

  “One or two might not even pass,” grumbled Gambini.

  “I don’t think you need worry about that, Ed,” Rosenbloom said. “If this operation goes to NSA, I doubt that anyone except you and Rimford and possibly Wheeler would be invited. Why should they? They have their own mathematicians and codebreakers. In fact, they’d undoubtedly feel they could do the job better than we could anyhow.”

  “Quint,” said Gambini, “has anyone argued this thing with the President? Pointed out to him the advantages of going public? I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take a stand?”

  “What advantages?” asked Rosenbloom. “And no, it’s not in the Agency’s interests to push this. If he releases what he’s got and it blows up, which it very easily could, there’ll be some bodies.”

  “We’ve already got some bodies,” said Gambini. “Do you have any idea what my standing is right now back home?”

  That would be CIT, where Gambini had been a full professor before coming to Goddard on a temporary assignment that had lasted, so far, three years.

  “Come on, Ed.” Rosenbloom leaned back against his desk, breathing hard. “We’re doing what’s right for us, and for the President. Try not to make waves. I know how you feel, but the hard truth is that Hurley is right. Maybe, after it’s all over, we can get you an award of some kind.”

  Gambini’s eyes hardened. “You talked to Hurley this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Suppose I just walked out?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rosenbloom said patiently, “just what your status would be. You’d undoubtedly be open to prosecution if you went to the newspapers with any of this. Although we both know the Agency would be reluctant to prosecute you. I mean, how would it look?

  “But you’d be on the outside. You’d learn only what we felt could safely be revealed. And you’d never be sure what was really happening here. Is that what you want?”

  Gambini rose slowly, his mouth a thin line, his cheeks flushed. “Rosenbloom,” said Harry, “you are a bastard.”

  The Director swiveled in Harry’s direction, a look of genuine hurt on his pork-chop features. Then he turned back to the project manager. “Now let’s get together. What are we going to do?”

  Gambini had taken his jacket off its hanger. He draped it over his arm. “All right,” he said. “For now.”

  Rosenbloom smiled with satisfaction. “And you, Harry? I really hadn’t expected a problem from you.”

  “I don’t disapprove of waiting to clear this with higher authority,” said Harry. “But I don’t think much of the way you treat your people.”

  Rosenbloom looked curiously at Harry. He was unsettled by his subordinate’s reaction. “Okay,” he said at length, “I appreciate your honesty.” There was another long pause. “Ed, you kept everyone on board this morning?”

  “Yes,” he said. “No one’s gone home.”

  “You and I should go talk to them.”

  At 8:00 P.M., the transmission was still coming in.

  Harry smuggled a case of French champagne into the Hercules spaces that evening. It was a violation, of course, but the occasion demanded something appropriate. They drank out of paper cups and coffee mugs. Rimford, who’d been called back from the West Coast, arrived with several more bottles. They went through it all, and when another supply appeared mysteriously, Gambini stepped in. “That’s enough,” he said. “The rest’ll be at the Red Limit this evening should anyone wish to claim it.”

  Harry found a hard copy of the first twelve pages or so of the transmission tacked to a bulletin board. The characters were binary. “How can you begin to make sense out of it?” he asked Majeski, who was watching him with curiosity.

  “First,” he said, leaning casually against the wall with his arms folded like a young Caesar, “we ask ourselves how we’d have encoded the message.”

  “And how would we?”

  “We’d start by giving them a set of instructions. For example, they’d need to know the number of bits in a byte. We use eight.” He looked at Harry uncertainly. “A byte,” he explained, “is a character. A letter or number, usually, although it doesn’t have to be. And it’s a result of the arrangement of the individual bits. We use eight. The Altheans use sixteen.”

&n
bsp; “How can you tell?”

  Majeski brought up a sequence on one of the monitors. “This is the beginning of their transmission.” It started with sixteen zeroes, then sixteen ones. And it went on like that for several thousand characters.

  “That seems simple enough,” said Harry.

  “That part of it is.”

  “What would we do next?”

  “What we would want to do, but can’t as yet, would be to create a self-initiating program. We’d have to assume certain things about the architecture of their computer, but there’s reason to believe that the digital approach we use in our computers is the most efficient. If not, it would still be the most basic type, the type a technological civilization would be most likely to possess, or at least to know about. And we would want a program that would run in a fairly unsophisticated model, with limited memory.

  “Ideally, the only action needed to get the thing up and running should be for the people on the other end to plug it into a computer and run a search program. In other words, any attempt to analyze the transmission, to look for patterns, triggers the program.”

  “Nice idea,” said Harry. “I assume the Altheans didn’t do that?”

  Majeski shook his head glumly. “Not as far as we can tell. We’ve been running it through the most advanced systems we have. And I don’t understand that. I really don’t. It would be the logical way to proceed.” He bit his lower lip. “It makes me wonder if a self-initiating program is really possible.”

  Harry went back to his office during the late afternoon. He was still feeling immensely pleased, and he found a fresh pile of messages. He read some of the telegrams and started returning calls. One had come from Hausner Diehl, the English department chairman at Yale, whom he had met once at a graduation ceremony.

  Diehl answered the phone himself. “Harry,” he said, “I wonder if you can explain something to me. Why was it necessary to withhold information on the Hercules discovery for eight weeks?”

  Harry sighed.

  After Diehl had lodged his complaint and added a warning that a formal protest was likely from Yale, he asked a disquieting question. “A lot of people here,” he said, “are not convinced that the truth is out yet. Is there anything we still haven’t been told?”