Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  Kids in any society are always being told by authority figures to keep their hands off something so they don’t break it. At school, teachers show them what they’ve gotten wrong. It took me awhile to realize that the best way to teach composition is to show a student what he’s doing well. The short compact sentence that makes its point with a minimum of verbiage. This is the way to do it, Sally. Give me more like this.

  But we don’t. We tell them they’ll break something, and after a while the kids come to believe it. The result is that most of us underestimate what we can do.

  Two of the stories in this collection, “Lighthouse” and “Cool Neighbor,” were written in collaboration with Michael Shara, the head of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit that the concepts were his.

  “Welcome to Valhalla” was written with Kathryn Lance. I’d had the basic idea for years, but I kept trying to drag a time traveler into it. And it didn’t work. Kathryn, who shares my taste for Richard Wagner, suggested Brunnhilde, and effectively wrote the story.

  Two other stories each inspired a series of novels: The Academy, with Priscilla Hutchins, was born in the sands of one of Saturn’s larger moons, in “Melville on Iapetus.” And the Alex Benedict novels, of which there are now four, got their start in “Dutchman,” Curiously, neither Alex nor Hutch appears in either story, though “Melville on Iapetus”—there’s another one of those great titles—was eventually adapted and used as the prologue for the Academy debut novel, The Engines of God.

  When I was in graduate school, at Wesleyan University, one of the instructors routinely held lunches for his classes at his home. One afternoon, several of us were sitting around out back, sipping Cokes and putting away donuts, when someone began describing an incident from the Renaissance. An Italian scholar, visiting Athens, had opened a trunk and found a trove of manuscripts from the classical age.

  Several days later the scholar loaded the manuscripts and the trunk onto a ship headed back to Venice. But on the way home, a storm blew up. The ship went down, and the trunk went with it. The scholar, fortunately, survived. But what had been in the trunk?

  It got me thinking about transience, about the things we lose as we travel through our lives. On a personal scale, friends and loved ones. On a larger scale, the Hanging Gardens and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. The Great Library. Several Homeric epics. Most of Sophocles’ plays. And, on still a third scale, countless individual acts of courage and compassion.

  I’ve never been able to get the scholar and his trunk out of my mind. There are echoes of it through all the stories in Part II, “Lost Treasures.”

  “Report from the Rear” is based on an actual event, as reported by H. L. Mencken, dating back to the Russo-Japanese War. “Black To Move” is a chess story, of course. (It’s my favorite game.) “The Far Shore,” set in an interstellar future, was my second professional story. The alert reader will easily conclude that the author grew up during the 1940’s radio age. “Sunrise” eventually became part of A Talent for War. And “Kaminsky At War” is set in the Academy universe. I couldn’t help suspecting that the bureaucrat that Kaminsky gets so angry with is Priscilla Hutchins.

  I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities raised by artificial intelligence. That’s probably left over from “Helen O’Loy.” “Gus” was my first attempt at an AI with a mind of its own. In this case, an AI portraying St, Augustine decides it’s a Catholic and demands access to the sacraments.

  There are two other AI stories in Part V And a novella, “Time Travelers Never Die,” which was as much pure joy to write as anything I’ve ever gone near.

  Now that I think of it, though, they all set off a charge of one kind or another. So I’m going to let you in on a secret: Writers are always going on about how difficult the work is, bottle of whiskey in the top drawer, writer’s block, and all that sort of thing. In fact none of it’s true. I’ve never had a job that provided such pure pleasure. We put that other stuff out there to keep the competition down.

  PART I

  UNLIKELY CONNECTIONS

  CRYPTIC

  It was at the bottom of the safe in a bulky manila envelope. I nearly tossed it into the trash with the stacks of other documents, tapes, and assorted flotsam left over from the Project.

  Had it been cataloged, indexed in some way, I’m sure I would have. But the envelope was blank, save for an eighteen-year-old date scrawled in the lower right hand corner, and beneath it, the notation “40 gh.”

  Out on the desert, lights were moving. That would be Brackett fine-tuning the Array for Orrin Hopkins, who was then beginning the observations that would lead, several years later, to new departures in pulsar theory. I envied Hopkins. He was short, round, bald, a man unsure of himself, whose explanations were invariably interspersed with giggles. He was a ridiculous figure, yet he bore the stamp of genius. And people would remember his ideas long after the residence hall named for me at Carrollton had crumbled.

  If I had not recognized my own limits and conceded any hope of immortality (at least of this sort), I certainly did so when I accepted the director’s position at Sandage. Administration pays better than being an active physicist, but it is death to ambition.

  And a Jesuit doesn’t even get that advantage.

  In those days, the Array was still modest: forty parabolic antennas, each thirty-six meters across. They were on tracks, of course, independently movable, forming a truncated cross. They had, for two decades, been the heart of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Now, with the Project abandoned, they were being employed for more useful, if mundane, purposes.

  Even that relatively unsophisticated system was good. As Hutching Chaney once remarked, the Array could pick up the cough of an automobile ignition on Mars.

  I circled the desk and fell into the uncomfortable wooden chair we’d inherited from the outgoing regime. The packet was sealed with tape that had become brittle and loose around the edges. I tore it open.

  It was a quarter past ten. I’d worked through my dinner and the evening hours, bored, drinking coffee, debating the wisdom in coming out here from JPL. The increase in responsibility was a good career move; but I knew now that Harry Cooke would never lay his hands on a new particle.

  I was committed for two years at Sandage, two years of working out schedules and worrying about insurance, two years of dividing meals between the installation’s sterile cafeteria and Jimmy’s Amoco Restaurant on Route 85. Then, if all went well, I could expect another move up, perhaps to Georgetown.

  I’d have traded it all for Hopkins’s future.

  I shook out six magnetic disks onto the desk. They were in individual sleeves, of the type that many installations had once used to record electromagnetic radiation. The disks were numbered and dated over a three-day period in 2001, two years earlier than the date on the envelope.

  Each was marked “Procyon.”

  In back, Hopkins and two associates were hunched over monitors. Brackett, having finished his job, was at his desk with his head buried in a book.

  I was pleased to discover that the disks were compatible to the Mark VIs. I inserted one, tied in a vocorder to get a hard copy, and went over to join the Hopkins group while the thing ran. They were talking about plasma. I listened for a time, got lost, noted that everyone around me (save the grinning little round man) also got lost, and strolled back to my computer.

  The trace drew its green-and-white pictures smoothly on the Mark VI display, and pages of hard copy clicked out of the vocorder. Something in the needle geometry scattering across the recording paper drew my attention. Like an elusive name, it drifted just beyond reach.

  Beneath a plate of the Andromeda Galaxy, a coffee pot simmered. I could hear the distant drone of a plane, probably out of Luke Air Force Base. Behind me, Hopkins and his people were laughing at something.

  There were patterns in the recording.

  The
y materialized slowly, identical clusters of impulses. The signals were artificial.

  Procyon.

  The laughter, the plane, the coffee pot, a radio that had been left on somewhere: everything squeezed down to a possibility.

  More likely Phoenix, I thought.

  Frank Myers had been SETI Director since Ed Dickinson’s death twelve years before. I reached him next morning in San Francisco.

  “No,” he said without hesitation. “Someone’s idea of a joke, Harry.”

  “It was in your safe, Frank.”

  “That damned safe’s been there forty years. Might be anything in it. Except messages from Mars…”

  I thanked him and hung up.

  It had been a long night: I’d taken the hard copy to bed and, by 5:00 A.M., had identified more than forty distinct pulse patterns. The signal appeared to be continuous: that is, it had been an ongoing transmission with no indication of beginning or end, but only irregular breaches of the type that would result from atmospherics and, of course, the long periods during which the target would have been below the horizon.

  It was clearly a reflected terrestrial transmission: radio waves bounce around considerably. But why seal the error two years later and put it in the safe?

  Procyon is a yellow-white class F3 binary, absolute magnitude 2.8, once worshipped in Babylon and Egypt. (What hasn’t been worshipped in Egypt?) Distance from Earth: 11.3 light-years.

  In the outer office, Beth Cooper typed, closed filing drawers, spoke with visitors.

  The obvious course of action was to use the Array. Listen to Procyon at 40 gigahertz, or all across the spectrum for that matter, and find out if it was, indeed, saying something.

  On the intercom, I asked Beth if any open time had developed on the system. “No,” she said crisply “We have nothing until August of next year.”

  That was no surprise. The facility had booked quickly when its resources were made available to the astronomical community on more than the limited basis that had prevailed for twenty years. Anyone wishing to use the radiotelescope had to plan far in advance. How could I get hold of the Array for a couple hours?

  I asked her to come into my office.

  Beth Cooper had come to Sandage from San Augustin with SETI during the big move twenty years before. She’d been secretary to three directors: Hutching Chaney, who had built Sandage; his longtime friend, Ed Dickinson; and finally, after Dickinson’s death, Frank Myers, a young man on the move, who’d stayed too long with the Project, and who’d reportedly been happy to see it strangled. In any case, Myers had contributed to its demise by his failure to defend it.

  I’d felt he was right, of course, though for the wrong reason. It had been painful to see the magnificent telescope at Sandage denied, by and large, to the scientific community while its grotesque hunt for the Little Green Man signal went on. I think there were few of us not happy to see it end.

  Beth had expected to lose her job. But she knew her way around the facility, had a talent for massaging egos, and could spell. A devout Lutheran, she had adapted cautiously to working for a priest and, oddly, seemed to have taken offense that I did not routinely walk around with a Roman collar.

  I asked one or two questions about the billing methods of the local utilities, and then commented, as casually as I could manage, that it was unfortunate the Project had not succeeded.

  Beth looked more like a New York librarian than a secretary at a desert Installation. Her hair was silver-gray. She wore steel-rimmed glasses on a long silver chain. She was moderately heavy, but her carriage and her diction were impeccable, imbuing her with the quality that stage people call presence.

  Her eyes narrowed to hard black beads at my remark. “Dr. Dickinson said any number of times that none of us would live to see results. Everyone attached to the program, even the janitors, knew that,” She wasn’t a woman given to shrugs, but the sudden flick in those dark eyes matched the effect. “I’m glad Dr. Dickinson didn’t live to see it terminated.” That was followed by an uncomfortable silence. “I don’t blame you, Doctor,” she said at length, referring to my public position that the facility was being underutilized.

  I dropped my eyes and tried to smile reassuringly. It must have been ludicrous. Her severe features softened. I showed her the envelope.

  “Do you recognize the writing?”

  She barely glanced at it, “It’s Dr. Dickinson’s.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t think Dickinson came to the Project until Hutch Chaney’s retirement. That was ’13, wasn’t it?”

  “He took over as Director then. But he was an operating technician under Dr. Chaney for, oh, ten or twelve years before that.” Her eyes glowed when she spoke of Dickinson.

  “I never met him,” I said.

  “He was a fine man.” She looked past me, over my shoulder, her features pale. “If we hadn’t lost him, we might not have lost the Project.”

  “If it matters,” I added gently.

  “If it matters.”

  She was right about Dickinson. He was articulate, a persuasive speaker, author of books on various subjects, and utterly dedicated to SETI. He might well have kept the Project afloat despite the cessation of federal funds and the increasing clamor among his colleagues for more time at the facility. But Dickinson was twelve years dead now. He’d returned to Massachusetts at Christmas, as was his custom. After a snowstorm, he’d gone out to help shovel a neighbor’s driveway and his heart had failed.

  At the time, I was at Georgetown. I can still recall my sense of a genius who had died too soon. He had possessed a vast talent, but no discipline; he had churned through his career hurling sparks in all directions. He had touched everything, but nothing had ever ignited. Particularly not SETI.

  “Beth, was there ever a time they thought they had an LGM?”

  “The Little Green Man signal?” She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. They were always picking up echoes and things. But nothing ever came close. Either it was KCOX in Phoenix, or a Japanese trawler in the middle of the Pacific.”

  “Never anything that didn’t fit those categories?”

  One eyebrow rose slightly. “Never anything they could prove. If they couldn’t pin it down, they went back later and tried to find it again. One way or another, they eliminated everything.” Or, she must be thinking, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation.

  Beth’s comments implied that suspect signals had been automatically stored. Grateful that I had not yet got around to purging obsolete data, I discovered that was indeed the case, and ran a search covering the entire time period back to the Procyon reception in 2011. I was looking for a similar signal.

  I got a surprise.

  There was no match. There was also no record of the Procyon reception itself.

  That meant presumably it had been accounted for and discarded.

  Then why, two years later, had the recordings been sealed and placed in the safe? Surely no explanation would have taken that long.

  SETI had assumed that any LGM signal would be a deliberate attempt to communicate, that an effort would therefore be made by the originator to create intelligibility, and that the logical way to do that was to employ a set of symbols representing universal constants: the atomic weight of hydrogen, perhaps, or the value of pi.

  But the move to Sandage had also been a move to more sophisticated, and considerably more sensitive, equipment. The possibility developed that the Project would pick up a slopover signal, a transmission of alien origin, but intended only for local receivers. Traffic of that nature could be immeasurably difficult to interpret.

  If the packet in the safe was anything at all, it was surely of this latter type. Forty gigahertz is not an ideal frequency for interstellar communication. Moreover, the intercept was ongoing, formless, no numbered parts, nothing to assist translation.

  I set the computer working on the text, using SETI’s own language analysis program. Then I instructed Brackett to call me if anything de
veloped, had dinner at Jimmy’s, and went home.

  There was no evidence of structure in the text. In English, one can expect to find a ‘U’ after a ‘Q’, or a vowel after a cluster of consonants. The aspirate is seldom doubled, nothing is ever tripled, and so on. But in the Procyon transmission, everything seemed utterly random.

  The computer counted 256 distinct pulse patterns. Eight bits. Nothing recurred at sufficient intervals to be a space. And the frequency count of these pulse patterns, or characters, was flat; there was no quantitative difference in use from one to another. All appeared approximately the same number of times. If it was a language, it was a language with no discernible vowels.

  I called Wes Phillips, who was then the only linguist I knew. Was it possible for a language to be structured in such a way?

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Unless you’re talking about some sort of construct. Even then—” He paused. “Harry, I can give you a whole series of reasons in maybe six different disciplines why languages need high and low frequency letters. To have a flat ‘curve,’ a language would have to be deliberately designed that way, and it would have to be non-oral. But what practical value would it have? Why bother?”

  Ed Dickinson had been an enigma. During the series of political crises that engulfed the nation after the turn of the century, he’d earned an international reputation as a diplomat, and as an eloquent defender of reason and restraint. Everyone agreed that he had a mind of the first rank. Yet, in his chosen field, he accomplished little. And eventually he’d gone to work for the Project, historically only a stepping-stone to serious effort. But he’d stayed.

  Why?

  Hutching Chaney was a different matter. A retired naval officer, he’d indulged in physics almost as a pastime. His political connections had been instrumental in getting Sandage built, and his assignment as Director was rumored to have been a reward for services rendered during the rough and tumble of congressional politics.