Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  He possessed a plodding sort of competence. He was fully capable of grasping, and visualizing, extreme complexity. But he lacked insight and imagination, the ability to draw the subtle inference. After his retirement from Sandage, Chaney had gone to an emeritus position at MIT, which he’d held for five years.

  He was a big man, more truck driver than physicist. Despite advancing age—he was then in his 70’s—and his bulk, he spoke and moved with energy. His hair was full and black. His light gray eyes suggested the shrewdness of a professional politician, and he possessed the confident congeniality of a man who had never failed at anything.

  We were in his home in Somerville, Massachusetts, a stone and glass house atop sweeping lawns. It was not an establishment that a retired physicist would be expected to inhabit. Chaney’s moneyed background was evident.

  He clapped a big hand on my shoulder and pulled me through one of those stiff, expensive living rooms that no one ever wants to sit in, into a paneled, leather-upholstered den at the rear of the house. “Martha,” he said to someone I couldn’t see, “would you bring us some port?” He looked at me for acquiescence.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s been a long time, Hutch.”

  Books lined the walls, mostly engineering manuals, a few military and naval histories. An articulated steel gray model of the Lance dominated the fireplace shelf. That was the deadly hydrofoil which, built at Chaney’s urging, had contributed to a multi-purpose navy that was simultaneously lethal, flexible, and relatively cheap.

  “The Church is infiltrating everywhere,” he said. “How are things at Sandage, Harry?”

  I described some of the work in progress. He listened with interest.

  A young woman arrived with a bottle, two glasses, and a plate of cheese. “Martha comes in three times a week,” Chaney said after she’d left the room. He smiled, winked, dipped a stick of cheese into the mustard, and bit it neatly in half, “You needn’t worry, Harry. I’m not capable of getting into trouble anymore. What brings you to Massachusetts?”

  I extracted the vocordings from my briefcase and handed them across to him. I watched patiently as he leafed through the thick sheaf of paper, and saw with satisfaction his change of expression.

  “You’re kidding, Harry,” he said. “Somebody really found one? When’d it happen?”

  “Twenty years ago,” I said, passing him the envelope and the original disks.

  He turned them over in his hands. “You’re not serious? There’s a mistake somewhere.”

  “It was in the safe,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t much matter where it was. Nothing like this ever happened.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Damned if I have any idea.”

  We sat not talking while Chaney continued to flip pages, grunting. He seemed to have forgotten his wine. “You run this yourself?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Hell of a lot of trouble for somebody to go to for a joke. Were the computers able to read any of it? No? That’s because it’s gibberish.” He stared at the envelope. “But it is Ed’s handwriting.”

  “Would Dickinson have any reason to keep such a thing quiet?”

  “Ed? No. Dickinson least of all. No one wanted to hear a signal more than he did. He wanted it so badly he invested his life in the Project.”

  “But could he, physically, have done this? Could he have picked up the LGM? Could he have done it without anyone else knowing? Was he good enough with computers to cover his tracks?”

  “This is pointless. Yes, he could have done it. And you could walk through Braintree without your pants.”

  A light breeze was coming through a side window, billowing the curtains. It was cool and pleasant, unusual for Massachusetts in August. Some kids were playing halfball out on the street.

  “Forty megahertz,” he said. “Sounds like a satellite transmission.”

  “That wouldn’t have taken two years to figure out, would it? Why keep the disks?”

  “Why not? I expect if you go down into the storeroom you’ll find all kinds of relics.”

  Outside, there was a sound like approaching thunder, exploding suddenly into an earsplitting screech. A stripped-down T-Bolt skidded by, scattering the ballplayers. An arm hung leisurely out the driver’s side. The car took the corner stop sign at about 45. A couple of fingers went up, but otherwise the game resumed as though nothing had happened.

  “All the time,” Chaney said. His back to the window, he hadn’t bothered to look around. “Cops can’t keep up with them anymore.”

  “Why was Dickinson so interested in the Project?”

  “Ed was a great man.” His face clouded somewhat, and I wondered if the port hadn’t drawn his emotions close to the surface. “You’d have to know him. You and he would have got along fine. He had a taste for the metaphysical, and I guess the Project was about as close as he could get.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did you know he spent two years in a seminary? Yes, somewhere outside Philadelphia. He was an altar boy who eventually wound up at Harvard. And that was that.”

  “You mean he lost his faith?”

  “Oh, yes. The world became a dark place, full of disaster. He always seemed to have the details on the latest pogrom, or viral outbreak, or drive-by murder. There are only two kinds of people, he told me once: atheists, and folks who haven’t been paying attention. But he always retained that fine mystical sense of purpose that you drill into your best kids, a notion that things are somehow ordered. When I knew him, he wouldn’t have presumed to pray to anyone. But he had all the drive of a missionary, and the same conviction of—” He dropped his head back on the leather upholstery and tried to seize a word from the ceiling. —Destiny.

  “Ed wasn’t like most physicists. He was competent in a wide range of areas. He wrote on foreign affairs for Commentary and Harper’s; he wrote on ornithology and systems analysis, on Malcolm Muggeridge, and Edward Gibbon.”

  He swung easily out of his chair and reached for a pair of fat matched volumes in mud-brown covers. It was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the old Modern Library edition. “He’s the only person I’ve ever known who’s actually read the thing.” He turned the cover of volume one so that I could see the inscription:

  For Hutch,

  In the fond hope that we can hold off the potherbs and the pigs.

  Ed

  “He gave it to me when I left SETI.”

  “Seems like an odd gift. Have you read it?”

  He laughed off the question. “You’d need a year.”

  “What’s the business about the potherbs and pigs?”

  He rose and walked casually to the far wall. There were photos of naval vessels and aircraft, of Chaney and President Fine, of the Sandage complex. He seemed to screw his vision into the latter. “I don’t remember. It’s a phrase from the book. He explained it to me at the time. But…” He held his hands outward, palms up.

  “Hutch, thanks.” I got up to go.

  “There was no signal,” he said. “I don’t know where these recordings came from, but Ed Dickinson would have given anything for a contact.”

  “Hutch, is it possible that Dickinson might have been able to translate the text? If there had been one?”

  “Not if you couldn’t. He had the same program.”

  I don’t like cities.

  Dickinson’s books were all out of print, and the used bookstores were clustered in Cambridge. Even then, the outskirts of Boston, like the city proper, were littered with broken glass and discarded newspapers. Surly kids milled outside bars. Windows everywhere were smashed or boarded. I went through a red light at one intersection rather than learn the intentions of an approaching band of ragged children with hard eyes. (One could scarcely call them children, though I doubt there was one over twelve.) Profanity covered the crumbling brick walls as high as a hand could reach. Much of it was misspelled.

  Boston had been Dickinson’s city. I wo
ndered what the great humanist thought when he drove through these streets.

  I found only one of his books: Malcolm Muggeridge: Faith and Despair. The store also had a copy of The Decline and Fall. On impulse, I bought it.

  I was glad to get back to the desert.

  We were entering a period of extraordinary progress, during which we finally began to understand the mechanics of galactic structure. McCue mapped the core of the Milky Way, Osterberger developed his unified field concepts, and Schauer constructed his celebrated revolutionary hypothesis on the nature of time. Then, on a cool morning in October, a team from Cal Tech announced that they had a new set of values for hyperinflation.

  In the midst of all this, we had an emergency. One night in late September, Earl Barlow, who was directing the Cal Tech groups, suffered a mild heart attack. I arrived just before the EMT’s, at about 2:00 a.m.

  While the ambulance carrying Barlow started down the mountain, his people watched helplessly, drinking coffee, too upset to work. The opportunity didn’t catch me entirely unprepared. I gave Brackett his new target. The blinking lights of the emergency vehicle were hardly out of sight before the parabolas swung round and fastened on Procyon.

  But there was only the disjointed crackle of interstellar static.

  I took long walks on the desert at night. The parabolas are lovely in the moonlight. Occasionally, the stillness is broken by the whine of an electric motor, and the antennas slide gracefully along their tracks. It was, I thought, a new Stonehenge of softly curving shapes and fluid motion.

  The Muggeridge book was a slim volume. It was not biographical, but rather an analysis of the philosopher’s conviction that the West has a death wish. It was the old argument that God had been replaced by science, that man had gained knowledge of a trivial sort, and as a result lost purpose.

  It was, on the whole, depressing reading. In his conclusion, Dickinson argued that truth will not wait on human convenience, that if man cannot adapt to a neutral universe, then that universe will indeed come to seem hostile. We must make do with what we have and accept truth wherever it leads. The modern cathedral is the radiotelescope.

  Sandage was involved in the verification procedure for McCue’s work, and for the already controversial Cal Tech equations. All that is another story. What is significant is that it got me thinking about verifications, and I realized I’d overlooked something. There’d been no match for the Procyon readings anywhere in the data banks since the original reception. But the Procyon recordings might themselves have been the confirmation of an earlier signal!

  It took five minutes to run the search. There were two hits.

  Both were fragments, neither more than fifteen minutes long; but there was enough of each to reduce the probability of error to less than one percent.

  The first occurred three weeks prior to the Procyon reception.

  The second went back to 2007, a San Augustin observation. Both were at 40 gigahertz. Both had identical pulse patterns. But there was an explosive difference, sedately concealed in the target information line. The 2007 transmission had come while the radiotelescope was locked on Sirius!

  When I got back to my office, I was trembling.

  Sirius and Procyon were only a few light-years apart. My God, I kept thinking, they exist! And they have interstellar travel!

  I spent the balance of the day stumbling around, trying to immerse myself in fuel usage reports and budget projections. But mostly what I did was watch the desert light grow hard in the curtains, and then fade. The two volumes of Edward Gibbon were propped between a Webster’s and some black binders. The books were thirty years old, identical to the set in Chaney’s den. Some of the pages, improperly cut, were still joined at the edges.

  I opened the first volume, approximately in the middle, and began to read. Or tried to. But Ed Dickinson kept crowding out the Romans. Finally I gave it up, took the book, and went home.

  There was duplicate bridge in town, and I lost myself in that for five hours. Then, in bed, still somewhat dazed, I tried The Decline and Fall again.

  It was not the dusty roll call of long-dead emperors that I had expected. The emperors are there, stabbing and throttling and blundering. And occasionally trying to improve things. But the fish-hawkers are there too. And the bureaucrats and the bishops.

  It’s a world filled with wine and legionnaires’ sweat, mismanagement, arguments over Jesus, and the inability to transfer power, all played out to the ruthless drumbeat of dissolution. An undefined historical tide, stemmed occasionally by a hero, or a sage, rolls over men and events, washing them toward the sea, (During the later years, I wondered, did Roman kids run down matrons in flashy imported chariots? Were the walls of Damascus defiled by profanity?)

  In the end, when the barbarians push at the outer rim of empire, it is only a hollow wreck that crashes down.

  Muggeridge had been there.

  And Dickinson, the altar boy, amid the fire and waste of the imperial city, must have suffered a second loss of faith.

  We had an electrical failure one night. It has nothing to do with this story except that it resulted in my being called in at 4:00 a.m., not to restore the power, which required a good electrician, but to pacify some angry people from New York, and to be able to say, in my report, that I had been on the spot.

  These things attended to, I went outside.

  At night, the desert is undisturbed by color or motion. It’s a composition of sand, rock, and star; a frieze, a Monet, uncomplicated, unchanging. It’s reassuring, in an age when little else seems stable. The orderly mid-twentieth century universe had long since disintegrated into a plethora of neutron galaxies, colliding black holes, time reversals, and God knows what.

  The desert is solid underfoot. Predictable. A reproach to the quantum mechanics that reflect a quicksand cosmos in which physics merges with Plato.

  Close on the rim of the sky, guarding their mysteries, Sirius and Procyon, the bright pair, sparkled. The arroyos are dry at that time of year, shadowy ripples in the landscape. The moon was in its second quarter. Beyond the administration building, the parabolas were limned in silver.

  My cathedral.

  My Stonehenge.

  And while I sat, sipping a Coors, and thinking of lost cities and altar boys and frequency counts, I suddenly understood the significance of Chaney’s last remark! Of course Dickinson had not been able to read the transmission. That was the point!

  I needed Chaney.

  I called him in the morning, and flew out in the afternoon. He met me at Logan, and we drove toward Gloucester. “There’s a good Italian restaurant,” he said. And then, without taking his eyes off the road: “What’s this about?”

  I’d brought the second Gibbon volume with me, and I held it up for him to see. He blinked.

  It was early evening, cold, wet, with the smell of approaching winter. Freezing rain pelted the windshield. The sky was gray, heavy, sagging into the city.

  “Before I answer any questions, Hutch, I’d like to ask a couple. What can you tell me about military cryptography?”

  He grinned. “Not much. The little I do know is probably classified.” A tractor-trailer lumbered past, straining, spraying water across the windows. “What, specifically, are you interested in?”

  “How complex are the Navy’s codes? I know they’re nothing like cryptograms, but what sort of general structure do they have?”

  “First off, Harry, they’re not codes. Monoalphabetic systems are codes. Like the cryptograms you mentioned. The letter ‘G’ always turns up, say, as an ‘M’. But in military and diplomatic cryptography, the ‘G’ will be a different character every time it appears. And the encryption alphabet isn’t usually limited to letters; we use numbers, dollar signs, ampersands, even spaces.” We splashed onto a ramp and joined the Interstate. It was elevated and we looked across rows of bleak rooftops. “Even the shape of individual words is concealed.”

  “How?”

  “By encrypting the spac
es.”

  I knew the answer to the next question before I asked it. “If the encryption alphabet is absolutely random, which I assume it would have to be, the frequency count would be flat. Right?”

  “Yes. Given sufficient traffic, it would have to be.”

  “One more thing, Hutch. A sudden increase in traffic will alert anyone listening that something is happening even if he can’t read the text. How do you hide that?”

  “Easy. We transmit a continuous signal, twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes it’s traffic, sometimes it’s garbage. But you can’t tell the difference.”

  God have mercy on us, I thought. Poor Dickinson.

  We sat at a small corner table well away from the main dining area. I shivered in wet shoes and a damp sweater. A small candle guttered cheerfully in front of us.

  “Are we still talking about Procyon?” he asked.

  I nodded. “The same pattern was received twice, three years apart, prior to the Procyon reception.”

  “But that’s not possible.” Chaney leaned forward intently. “The computer would have matched them automatically. We’d have known.”

  “I don’t think so.” Half a dozen prosperous, overweight men in topcoats had pushed in and were jostling each other in the small entry. “The two hits were on different targets. They would have looked like an echo.”

  Chaney reached across the table and gripped my wrist, knocking over a cup. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Are you suggesting somebody’s moving around out there?”

  “I don’t think Ed Dickinson had any doubts.”

  “Why would he keep it secret?”

  I’d placed the book on the table at my left hand. It rested there, its plastic cover reflecting the glittering red light of the candle. “Because they’re at war.”