The Hercules Text Page 12

  “No,” said Harry. “There was nothing else.”

  And then came the question: “There has been no second signal?”

  Harry hesitated. His face warmed. “We described everything we had.”

  Harry’s job did not normally require him to lie; it was not a tactic he was good at, and he was moderately surprised to get away with his reply. But he felt the weight of the deception nonetheless.

  It was not a night to eat alone. He called Leslie.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d love to.”

  Harry would have preferred to get away from Goddard altogether for a few hours. The conversation with Diehl had bothered him more than it should have, perhaps. It had, after all, been the only negative note in an extraordinarily successful day. Yet there was something ominous about it, the sense of being on a slippery slope, that depressed him. But Leslie wanted to stay close.

  “They’re still running the transmission through the computers, and something could happen any time,” she said. So they went to the Red Limit.

  “They’re not going to start reading it tonight?” asked Harry.

  “No, of course not. But Ed’s worried.”

  “Why?”

  “I think because they expected an immediate breakthrough after they saw the initial setup of the transmission. When I left, he was saying that they’ll solve it quickly, or not for years.”

  “Is it possible,” asked Harry, “that it might never be translated?”

  “Now, there,” she said, raising her eyes from the menu, “is a dark thought.”

  They ordered fish and a carafe of white wine. Leslie by candlelight was more attractive than he’d expected. “Harry,” she asked quietly, after the meal had come, “are things not good at home?”

  He hadn’t expected the question. “You’ve been talking to Pete,” he said accusingly.

  “No. It’s easy enough to see. You wear a wedding ring; but you never go home for dinner.”

  “I guess not,” he said. He continued eating, drank some wine, patted his lips with a napkin, and said simply, “It’s kaput.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugged.

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Her lips caught the light. She wore a sheer white blouse with the top two buttons open. He followed the creamy arc of her left breast down into the lapels. “I don’t mind,” he said. She smiled, reached across the table, and touched his forearm. “I lost her the night they picked up the signal.” He shook his head. “No, I guess it happened long before that.”

  “Any children?”

  “One. A boy.”

  “That makes it even more difficult.”

  Harry stared at her again. “Hell with it,” he said. He finished his fish, drained the wine, and sat back defiantly, arms crossed.

  She said nothing.

  “You disapprove?”

  “I only disapprove when I’m getting paid, Harry. Then I disapprove of everything.” Her eyes registered regret. “I don’t know why that should be. Maybe because the end is always bad.”

  Harry grinned. “You’re a hell of a psychologist,” he said. “Is that what you tell everyone?”

  “No. I tell patients what they pay me to hear, what’s good for them over the short run, because that’s all there is, really. To you, I can speak my mind.”

  “Speak your mind,” said Harry.

  “You’re an interesting male, Harry. In some difficult areas, you’re highly adaptive. You’ve managed, for example, to fit in remarkably well with some of the foremost scientific minds of the age. People like Gambini and Quint Rosenbloom believe damned little of the human race is even worth knowing. But they both respect you. Cord Majeski talks only to mathematicians, cosmologists, and virgins. Rimford talks only to God. Yet they all accept you.”

  “You don’t like Majeski,” said Harry.

  “Did I say that?”

  “I think you did,” smiled Harry.

  “I guess people like Majeski tend to bring emotions close to the surface, one way or another. But that’s neither here nor there.” She leaned forward. “What I’m trying to say, Harry, is that I like you, I hate seeing you like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Harry, any stranger off the street could tell you that you aren’t behaving in character.”

  “How would you know?”

  “For one thing, you smile easily. But I have yet to see you smile without downcast eyes. Hell, you’re doing it now.” An edge had crept into her voice.

  “I’m sorry,” Harry said. “This has been a bad time for me. What do you prescribe?”

  She leaned forward. The blouse fell open a bit more. “I don’t know. For a start, probably, you should recognize that she’s gone.”

  “You don’t know us,” he protested. “How can you say that?”

  “I’ve probably said too much already,” she agreed. “It’s the wine.”

  “Why do you think there’s no hope for a reconciliation?”

  “I didn’t say there was no hope. You may get a reconciliation. But the woman you remember is gone. Whatever you may have had, and I can see that it was pretty substantial, it gets irrevocably fractured when somebody walks out. It’s never the same. A reconciliation is, at best, a holding action.”

  “You sound like Pete Wheeler.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry. But if he said that, he was right. What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Julie.”

  “Well, Julie’s a damned fool. She won’t replace you very easily. She may or may not be smart enough to realize that quickly. When she does, there’s a fair probability she’ll be back. If that’s what you want, and you play your cards right, your chances are pretty good. But you’ll be trapped in a bad situation.” She pushed the remains of her dinner away. “Enough for me,” she said.

  Harry was silent.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Harry said. “I know I’d like to have her back.”

  “I’d like to be twenty-two again.” She watched him carefully. “I’m sorry, Harry. I don’t mean to be cruel. But we’re talking about the same sort of thing.”

  Majeski was annoyed.

  He sat in Gambini’s office with his head thrown back, his eyes closed, his cheeks puffed out, and his arms hanging at the sides of the chair. The project manager, perched on the edge of his desk, was explaining something. The mathematician nodded, and nodded again; but his eyes never opened. Looking up, Gambini saw Harry and waved him in.

  “Got a question for you,” he said, as Harry closed the door.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What would happen if we sent a copy of the transmission over to the National Security Agency and they were able to make some sense of it?”

  “They’ve got a custom-made fifth-generation Cray computer,” Majeski interjected. “It might be enough to get us into the instructions. That’d be all we’d need: just enough to get started.”

  Harry thought it over. He didn’t know the NSA people well; they were a community unto themselves, competent, elitist, secretive, scared to death to talk to anyone who might deduce something from their tone of voice. “I don’t think NSA has any interest in this project, and I suspect they’re busy enough over there that they’d prefer not to get involved anyhow. But there are people around the President, the security people mostly, who’d like to get Hercules out of Goddard and into Fort Meade. If you go to NSA for help, you’ll be putting ammunition into their hands. Do that, and it probably won’t matter whether they succeed or not.”

  “So we work on the project at Fort Meade,” grumbled Majeski. “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference,” said Harry, “is that you won’t be working on it, Cord. The project goes over there, it becomes theirs. You work for NASA, not NSA. They’d use you only if they decided you were irreplaceable. Are you?”

  “What you’re saying is that the computers to solve the transmission may be available, but we
can’t use them without losing control of the project. That’s ridiculous.”

  Harry shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s the way the government works.”

  “This is what we’re talking about,” said Gambini, anxious to change the subject. He picked up a laserdisc. “It’s a complete data set. It’s about six minutes long, at a little better than eighty thousand baud.” He handed it to Harry. “The Altheans have broken the transmission into distinct sections. We have sixty-three so far. This is number one, and it is very likely a set of instructions.”

  “But,” said Majeski, “we have to get a sufficiently powerful computer.”

  “And the one ninety-sixes aren’t good enough?” asked Harry. “I thought the theory was that the program should work in something basic.”

  “Who knows what’s basic to the Altheans?” Gambini groaned, as if he were literally in pain. “I’m not sure how to handle this, Harry. I hate to waste time with peripheral approaches when it’s probably just a matter of finding the right computer. If our assumptions are wrong, and we have to solve this thing by some sort of statistical analysis, none of us may live long enough to see a result.”

  Harry turned the laserdisc over in his hand. It gleamed in its plastic cover. “Maybe,” he said, “you’re going at this the wrong way. You’ve been using the one ninety-six?”

  “Of course.”

  “The biggest we have. And now we want to go bigger yet. But Majeski’s logic suggests smaller.” Harry’s eyes fell on Gambini’s personal computer, a portable two fifty-six-K unit.

  “I don’t know much about computers,” he continued, “except that bigger ones are more complicated. More places to store information. More instructions required to make it work.”

  Gambini’s eyes widened. “You mean a smaller computer can do things a bigger one can’t?”

  “A program not designed to address all the memory in the one ninety-six might not run.”

  Gambini leaped from his chair and bolted from the office. He returned moments later with an Apple. They cleared off a section of the desk and set it down. Harry plugged it in. “Wait a minute,” said Gambini. “Our search programs won’t run in this machine. There isn’t enough memory.”

  “Rewrite them,” said Harry.

  “Jesus,” grumbled Gambini. “I hate to think how long that’ll take.”

  “Hold it.” Majeski left the office, opened a filing cabinet in the workroom, and came back with a disc. “Star Trek,” he said. “This has been around here for years. It doesn’t need much memory, and it includes a sequence that allows the Enterprise to analyze Klingon tactical positions.” He grinned, and shrugged. “What the hell.”

  He loaded the game, punched in his choice for a mission, and activated the search instructions. Then he turned to Harry. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your idea.”

  The monitor carried a simulation of the Enterprise views-screen. It showed a handful of stars, several dozen planets, and a curious disturbance off the beam that might have been something with a cloaking device. Two status boards occupied the lower portion of the screen: ship’s systems on the left, combat search and analysis on the right.

  Harry added the Hercules disc and keyed it in. The starfield rotated slowly, and the Enterprise began to move.

  Red lamps over both laserdisc ports blinked on.

  “It’s reading,” said Gambini.

  The starship was accelerating rapidly. The disturbance that might have been a cloaked vessel suddenly dropped off the screen. Gradually the stars rolled past the Enterprise, much as they had on the old television program, until they thinned out, and then they, too, were gone.

  “This doesn’t happen in the game,” observed Majeski.

  The search and analysis board, which carried the legend “No Contacts,” went blank.

  And a cube appeared.

  “Not part of the game!” Majeski squeezed up close to the screen, as if to look deep into it.

  The cube rotated at a forty-five-degree angle, stopped, and reversed itself.

  Gambini watched hopefully. When he spoke, his voice was tense. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

  It was a perfectly ordinary cube. And it was going to look goddam silly in the official releases. The Altheans might be good engineers, but they clearly needed some work in public relations. “Why?” asked Harry. “Why the hell do they send us a block?”

  “It’s not just a block,” said Rimford. “It’s an essential part of the most significant communication, I would think, in the history of the species.”

  Harry stared at the older man. “I still don’t see why.”

  “Because they’ve said hello to us in the simplest way possible. When we discussed the problems related to communication between cultures that had previously been totally isolated, we thought purely in terms of passing instructions. But they’ve gone a step further: they must have thought we would like some tangible encouragement, so they gave us a picture.

  “And they’ve also set some parameters for the architecture of the computer they expect us to use to get at the balance of the transmission.”

  Majeski and his technicians had finished making adjustments to the one ninety-six. The mathematician replaced a panel and signaled to Gambini, who loaded one of the standard search programs and then inserted the transmission disc.

  They’d tied in several monitors so everyone could see. The working spaces were jammed: representatives from the off-duty shifts had arrived, and a party atmosphere prevailed.

  Gambini waved everyone to silence. “I think we’re ready,” he said. He put the computer into its scan mode, and the laughter died. All eyes turned to the screens.

  The red lamps came on.

  “It’s working,” said Angela Dellasandro.

  A door closed somewhere in the building, and Harry heard a boiler ignite.

  The monitors remained blank.

  The lamps went off.

  And a black point appeared. It was barely discernible. While Harry was trying to decide whether it was really there, it expanded and developed a bulge; a line grew out of the bulge, and crossed the width of the screen. Then it turned down at a right angle and described a loop. From the base of the loop, a second line appeared, drew itself out parallel to the first, and at its opposite end formed a second, connecting circle.

  It was a cylinder.

  Somebody cheered. Harry heard a pop and a fizz.

  Rimford stood under a monitor beside Leslie, his face illuminated by pure joy. “So much,” he said, “for Brockmann’s Thesis.”

  “Not yet,” said Gambini. “It’s too early to tell.”

  A twelve-character byte appeared beneath the cylinder. Rimford’s breathing had become audible. “That’ll be its name,” he said. “The symbol for cylinder. We’re getting some vocabulary.”

  “What’s Brockmann’s Thesis?” asked Harry.

  Leslie glanced questioningly at Rimford, and he nodded. “Harvey Brockmann,” she said, “is a Hamburg psychologist who maintains that alien cultures probably would not be able to communicate with one another except on a superficial level. This would happen, he says, because physiology, environment, social conditions, and history are essential to the way in which we interpret experience and, consequently, communicate and understand ideas.” Her demeanor grew thoughtful. “Ed is going to argue that he may yet be right, since we’re still at an extremely early stage. But I think we’ve already seen features of Althean approaches to problem solving that are very much like our own. We may get another striking demonstration of that before we’re through here tonight.”

  That caught Rimford’s interest. “In what way, Leslie?”

  “Think about us,” she said. “If we were encoding pictures for another species, what image would we absolutely not fail to send?”

  “Our own,” said Harry.

  “Bingo. Harry, you’d make a hell of a psychologist. Now I tell you what I think we’re going to learn; the capability to create a technological civiliz
ation imposes essentially similar disciplines of logic and perception that outweigh, and probably heavily outweigh, the factors proposed by Brockmann.”

  “We’ll see,” said Gambini. “I hope you’re right.”

  “The cylinder’s gone,” said Harry.

  The point appeared again. This time they got a sphere.

  Then a pyramid.

  And a trochoid.

  “Does Rosenbloom know about this yet?” asked Harry.

  “I’m not sure we’re exactly ready for a visit by Rosenbloom,” said Gambini. “I’ll call him a little later, after we’re sure what we have. Meantime, we’ll want to get these drunks out of here. That was a hell of a precedent you set. Now they all think they can do it.”

  After a while, the cylinder reappeared, but at right angles to the original figure. A new byte became visible. “It’ll be similar to the first one,” said Majeski, “and that portion can probably be understood to imply the object itself. The variation between the two should equate to a difference in angle, or some such thing.”

  They got a third cylinder.

  The geometrical figures continued well into the evening. Harry got bored, eventually, and excused himself to call Rosenbloom. It was after midnight by then.

  The Director was happy neither at the timing nor at the content of the message. “Keep me informed,” he said gruffly.

  Harry found a dark office and dozed for about an hour. When he returned to the operations center, he still felt washed out. He found Gambini, told him about the Director’s response, and was about to say good night when he noticed that the physicist hadn’t really heard anything he’d said. And in fact, the mood of the whole place had changed in a not too subtle manner. “What happened?” he asked.

  Various geometrical figures were displayed on different screens. Harry realized that the program was complete, that the investigators were now beginning a more detailed examination. Gambini commandeered a unit. “There’s something you should see.” He keyed in, and stepped back to allow Harry an unobstructed view.

  Leslie walked over. “Hi,” she said. “Looks like serious doings tonight. I understand you’re responsible, Harry.” She beamed at him. “Congratulations.”